Shahzia Sikander shows her short-film, 3 to 12 Nautical Miles, in Hong Kong for M+ Museum, unravelling Hong Kong’s colonial histories with Mughal courts, opium fields and imperial vessels.
Office towers gridded with illuminated windows, LED billboards flickering late into the night and reflections of neon signage rippling across the water – Hong Kong’s glimmering skyline is an urban panorama of light, laced with echoes of its colonial past and its formation as a maritime entrepôt between East and West. The author and historian Jan Morris described the vibrant city as “an astounding epilogue of empire,” capturing its particular position as both a product of imperial networks and their lingering aftermath which remains embedded in its architecture, economic structures and visual and cultural identities today.
This intriguing “imperial afterlife,” as artist Shahzia Sikander puts it, has become the muse for her recent moving-image commission for M+ Museum, titled 3 to 12 Nautical Miles. The artist has long moved between various geographies and questioned the structures that shape how histories are produced and circulated, often returning to the conditions under which they are fragmented or displaced. “I am drawn to complex geopolitical histories because they reveal the networks of power, empire and extraction that continue to shape the world today,” she says. This newest work turns to histories that cut across South Asia, China and Britain.
As she has described it, “history demonstrates that empire functions through systems of interdependence,” where shifts in one region set conditions for extraction and control in another. In the 19th century the weakening of the Mughal empire and the destabilisation of the Qing dynasty coincided with Britain’s consolidation of imperial power, in which the role of global trade allowed territorial control across the region to be redrawn – including the cession of Hong Kong as a colonial outpost.
Lighting up the harbour each night, Sikander’s animation is a mesmerising mirage of colours and forms, a shifting montage of hand-drawn scenes tracing tensions between these entities of power, and the porosity of geopolitical boundaries and sovereign control.
It begins with a transcendental “sunburst” motif associated with divine light, which gradually dissolves into fields of poppies laced with both a sense of beauty and underlying violence, recalling the British coercion that drove Chinese opium trade and registering its darker consequences of pleasure and addiction. Across the shifting sequences of the nine-minute cycles, the poppies then bloom and burst across scenes of ornate Mughal interiors, thrones of empires, cartographic fragments, forested terrains, territorial waters, and portraits of powerful figures such as Queen Victoria and Emperor Akbar II alongside Chinese and British captains and officials.
The sampan, which Sikander recalls is her favourite of the film’s recurring motifs, multiplies into shifting formations as it counters the imposing scale of British naval vessels with a smaller, more adaptive form tied to labour, survival and local economies that operated alongside imperial trade.
It is not incidental that 3 to 12 Nautical Miles sits facing the harbour and is best experienced from a ferry moving across it, with both image and viewer in motion as the pixels disperse and gather like shifting tides. As Sikander notes, “the currents are the same that witnessed all the histories that have taken place on the harbour itself,” and the animation works to fold these histories into the city’s daily rhythms, along the very waters that once facilitated their exchange.
While it has historically been defined as a centre of trade and finance, the city has in recent decades come to be recognised as Asia’s artistic capital. And the work was unveiled at a particularly active moment in the city’s cultural calendar during Hong Kong Art Week, amid a constellation of fairs (including Hong Kong Art Basel 2026), exhibitions and public programming.
This shift has taken clearer form in recent years through sustained investment in cultural infrastructure, as both public and private initiatives have begun to shape new institutional and spatial frameworks across the city. A number of cultural districts have emerged within this context, including Wong Chuk Hang, Tai Kwun and the West Kowloon Cultural District (WestK), with the latter forming the most visible expression of these developments.
Alongside the Xiqu Centre and Hong Kong Palace Museum, as well as further venues still in development, West K is anchored by M+, the Herzog & de Meuron-designed museum which has become a crucial institution for the Asian visual arts scene since its opening in 2021. Its focus on re-centring visual culture from Asia within a global context, not simply by extending its inclusion in the canon, but also by reframing how these diverse regional histories are told and circulated from within, becomes a fitting home for Sikander’s contemplations on trans-regional narratives, making them visible to the city at an urban scale. @shahzia.sikander, @mplusmuseum
3 to 12 Nautical Miles will remain on view every night at M+ in Hong Kong until June 21.
