Demographic and Gender Equality
of the M+ Museum Collection

Intro

When brainstorming the options for my final year project at NYU Steinhardt’s Visual Arts Administration program, I came across the collection metadata of the M+ Museum in Hong Kong. The museum houses four permanent collections — the M+ Collection, M+ Sigg Collection, M+ Library Special Collection and M+ Collection Archives, each serving a different purpose. The set of the current online collection data is made available through the Open Data project and the M+ API for developers, designers, artists, and creators — anyone curious about telling stories through data, to increase accessibility and encourage creative projects.

As stated on their website:

The M+ Collection is an interdisciplinary collection of visual culture that brings together design and architecture, moving image, and visual art works from Hong Kong, mainland China, elsewhere in Asia, and beyond.

The M+ Sigg Collection is one of the largest and most comprehensive collections of contemporary Chinese art in the world.

The two collections seemed to be two prominent arrays of artworks representing the contemporary visual culture of the Greater China Area and other Asian countries, with a possible extension to a global scale. A few questions popped up in my head while reading this — How do we assess if the museum is correctly identifying its collection and collection policy or not? Are artists of all genders equally represented? Is the collection a reflection of M+’s mission “to become a global hub for visual culture in Asia”?

Since there is yet to be much analysis done, I decided to look at the collection using my newly acquired Python skills and probe deeper into the reasonings. Having the above research questions in mind, I set the research hypothesis as the gender distribution in M+’s collection might be imbalanced, and the nationality of the artists of the collected works is expected to be predominantly Asian. Through qualitative and quantitative analysis, I hope to find the answers to my questions.

Disclaimer

Please note that the findings presented here are not absolute truths, but rather inferences based on the available dataset. It should be noted that the dimensions of diversity we considered are limited and do not fully account for intersectionality. It is important to understand that these results are not intended to be accusatory, but rather to stimulate discussion. Furthermore, we acknowledge that the pre-processing of the data may contain some errors.

Findings

The data visualization shows a clear dominant amount of works by Asian artists (East Asian to be precise), taking up more than 80% of the collected artworks. The result is echoing with their description of the collection which pinpointed artworks from Hong Kong, mainland China and elsewhere in Asia. The actual percentage of artworks by ethnically Asian artists could be higher since the metadata only provides information on the maker’s nationality but left ethnicity blank. Artists such as Tehching Hsieh who is of Asian ethnicity but with nationality status of another country (in Hsieh’s case, American) are categorized according to their place of citizenship. Thus additional information on the ethnicity of the artist will be helpful in order to scrutinize the demographic of the M+’s collection.

The choropleth map below gives a clearer visualization of the disparity in the geographical distribution of the country of origin in the M+ Museum Collection. (Note: counts are normalized logarithmically for a better visual presentation.) The charts reflect that the M+ Museum successfully put together a collection of artworks with geographical tags of China, Hong Kong and other Asian countries, yet is still far from its mission of having a global viewpoint towards cultural insights.

The gender distribution in M+’s collection is extremely lopsided with over 70% of their collection from male artists. Design studios, artist groups and other collectives are marked as “Not Applicable”, which occupies 14.5% of the total collected works, 2.9% more than work by female makers. The 7:1 ratio of male and female artist unveil not only the distorted gender representation of the male and female artist in the museum collection but also probably the gender inequality in the Asian art market.

To link the nationality of the artists and their gender, I decided to look at the gender composition of the 5 most frequently appeared nationalities, which are: Chinese, Hong Kong, Japanese, South Korean and American. From the graph below we can see that works by Japanese artists have the most unbalanced gender ratio, where works by male artists are 12 times more than their female counterparts. Collected works made by Chinese and Hong Kong artists share a similar ratio of around 7-to-1, consistent with the overall gender ratio of the whole collection, whereas those from South Korean and American artists have a similar 3:1 ratio. This can link to the representation of female artists in the art market of each country or may reflect a hidden bias of the current collecting practice of the M+ Museum.

In the dataset, the individual artworks were categorized by the medium. Some of the works are interdisciplinary works thus multiple categories were assigned. For ease of visualization and analysis, I reduced the category count for each work to 1 and renamed the variable as “Primary Category”. The top 10 categories in the M+ Collection are listed below, and it is clear that photography and painting are two of the most dispersed categories among others. On the other hand, works of video medium have a more balanced gender profile.

Similar to the category, the artworks in the collection of the M+ Museum are categorized by different areas, and similarly, only the primary area is considered for this analysis. The M+ Museum divided its collection into three areas, Visual Art, Design and Architecture and Moving Image. Visual Art took up more than 70% of the total collected artworks, and interestingly, Moving Image is categorized as an individual area separated from Visual Art. When probing deeper into the gender composition of the three areas, visual arts has a shocking 85.6% of works by male artists, 7 times more than their female counterparts. Moving images have a “better” 2:1 male-to-female ratio, which is consistent with the gender ratio of the video category mentioned in the above section. The gender disparity of different areas and categories may reflect the current reception of female artists in a specific art genre.

Contemporary art sprouted in mainland China and Hong Kong during the period from the 1940s — 1970s, amidst the period of political upheaval (Zhou, 2020). Thus I looked at the birth year of artists in the M+ Collection data and created the following race plot. From the chart below, we can see that the total number of artists whose works were acquired by M+ concentrated around the birth years 1930s — 1980s, and peaked in the 1960s. An increase in the number of female artists is observed during the 1960s period. This can be a result of the awakening of women’s consciousness in China during the 1980s when females were able to break free from family duties and pursue a career of their own (Le, 1991).

Conclusion

In conclusion, I have analyzed the nationality and gender composition of the two collections (M+ Collection and M+ Sigg Collection) combined. And the result tells an interesting story of M+ currently putting together a collection primarily concentrated on visual artworks from Hong Kong and China which is disproportionally “man” made. They combine to represent the epitome of the contemporary art scene in Hong Kong and mainland China and extended to cover Asian visual culture. It might be due to the long-rooted gender disparity in the global and Asia art market that the M+’s collections also failed to balance the gender composition in their collected works. Due to the limitation of the binary gender system and nationality categorization of the current data, this study cannot move forward to dig deeper into the diversity of non-binary gender identities and the ethnicity of the makers.

The future of M+ is promising as a rising one of its kind contemporary art institution in Asia, yet more work can be done to investigate the demography of the collection and to balance the gender composition through active and activist collecting campaigns (Walker et al, 2019), in order to better represent their mission and be the true and responsible trendsetter for Hong Kong and China in the contemporary art scene.

Reference

Clarke, David J. Hong Kong Art: Culture and Decolonization. Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2002.

Chong, Do-Ryun, Lesley Ma, and Pauline J. Yao. M+ Collections: Highlights. London: Thames & Hudson, 2021.

Le, Daiyun. The Awakening of Chinese Women’s Consciousness. Free Forum of Literature. 1991 (3). 45–49. doi:CNKI:SUN:WXLT.0.1991–03–012.

M+ Museum. About the Collection | M+. n.d. https://www.mplus.org.hk/en/about-the-collection/

M+ Team. Welcome to M+. M+ Magazine. 2021. https://www.mplus.org.hk/en/magazine/welcome-to-m-plus/

Walker, E., & Gwilt, D. (2019). "Collection development strategy: Potentially everything is useful and interesting". The curation and care of museum collections. Taylor & Francis Group.

Zhou, Yan. A History of Contemporary Chinese Art : 1949 to Present, Springer Singapore Pte. Limited, 2020. ProQuest Ebook Central, https://ebookcentral.proquest.com/lib/nyulibrary-ebooks/detail.action?docID=6272307.

Acknowledgments

Jennifer M Babcock Advisor

Aidan Feldman Coding Advisor

‍