WKCDA Announces Signing of Cooperation Agreements with Shanghai Peers

Riding on the Fourth Plenary Session of the Hong Kong/Shanghai Cooperation Conference held in Hong Kong today, the West Kowloon Cultural District Authority (WKCDA) further expands its already extensive arts and culture networks within the region.  Witnessing by the officials of the two cities, including the Chief Executive of the Hong Kong Special Administrative Region, Mrs Carrie Lam, and Shanghai Mayor, Mr Ying Yong, WKCDA signed cooperation agreements with Shanghai West Bund (Shanghai Xuhui Waterfront Area Comprehensive Development and Construction Management Committee), SMG Performing Arts Group, and Power Station of Art, as well as renewed the partnership agreement between the Xiqu Centre at the West Kowloon Cultural District (West Kowloon) and The Shanghai Center of Chinese Operas.
 

Under the agreement, WKCDA and Shanghai West Bund will join hands to launch exhibition projects and establish talent nurturing and exchange programmes. Both parties will facilitate cultural and creative branding activities, as well as share the experience in developing their district so as to establish a cooperation platform to promote the exchange of arts and culture in the two cities and sharing of resources.
 

To establish a deep-rooted partnership, WKCDA and SMG Performing Arts Group together will organise a large-scale arts and cultural performance, promote touring of each other’s productions, utilise theatre and promotional resources, and deepen the exchange of talent and management. 
 

As a museum dedicated to contemporary visual culture at West Kowloon, M+ will collaborate with Power Station of Art to tour selected exhibitions, co-curate large-scale exhibitions, offer preferential loan of each other’s collection objects and share archives. Both parties will meet once every year to decide the proposed plan for cooperation on exhibitions in the following year.
 

The Xiqu Centre at West Kowloon and the Shanghai Center of Chinese Operas entered into a partnership agreement in July 2016 to carry on the legacy of Chinese opera and enhance the operation and development of the xiqu centres in both cities.  The renewal of the agreement allows both parties to continue the existing cooperation projects. 
 

Duncan Pescod, Chief Executive Officer of WKCDA, underscores the importance of the collaboration: “Facilitating cultural exchange and cooperation is always one of the core directions of WKCDA.  In view of the opening of the Xiqu Centre, Art Park, Freespace and M+ from the end of this year onward, WKCDA will strengthen the cultural cooperation and exchange with Shanghai as well as promote artistic creation and development.”
 

Remarks
 

About the Xiqu Centre
The Xiqu Centre, set to open in 2018, is one of the West Kowloon Cultural District’s major venues and acts as the eastern gateway to the district. Specifically built for performances of Chinese traditional theatre, it will also provide a centre for the production, education and research of this unique art form.
 

About M+
M+ is a museum dedicated to collecting, exhibiting, and interpreting visual art, design and architecture, moving image, and Hong Kong visual culture of the twentieth and twenty-first centuries. In Hong Kong’s West Kowloon Cultural District, we are building one of the largest museums of modern and contemporary visual culture in the world, with a bold ambition to establish ourselves as one of the world’s leading cultural institutions. Our aim is to create a new kind of museum that reflects our unique time and place, a museum that builds on Hong Kong’s historic balance of the local and the international to define a distinctive and innovative voice for Asia’s twenty-first century.
 

About the West Kowloon Cultural District
Located on Hong Kong’s Victoria Harbour, West Kowloon Cultural District is one of the largest cultural projects in the world. Its vision is to create a vibrant new cultural quarter for Hong Kong. With a complex of theatres, performance spaces and museums, the West Kowloon Cultural District will produce and host world-class exhibitions, performances and cultural events, as well as provide 23 hectares of public open space, including a two-kilometre waterfront promenade.