What We Ask of Monsters
At M+ in Hong Kong, more than 400 works trace two centuries of Asian fantasy, from ukiyo-e demons to Godzilla to AI-assisted painting. The show argues that these creatures were never just entertainment.
A notice greets visitors at the entrance of “Myths and Monsters: The Art of Fantasy in Asia”, in English and Chinese, warning that some works may contain sensitive content. It appears again before the final chapter. Since the exhibition opened at M+ on 17 October, it has been easy to see why.
On view until 4 April 2027, the show bills itself as the first major survey of two centuries of Asian fantasy, mythology and supernatural storytelling. Its premise is that these images were never simply escapist. “Fantasy is not just about escapism,” says Isabella Tam, the curator of visual art. “It is a creative tool” that lets artists approach what cannot be addressed head-on: war, bereavement, the fear of their own inventions.
More than 400 works span fine art, architecture, fashion, film, video games, manga and digital culture. That range is both the show’s ambition and its risk. The curators answer it with a single spine, a lineage running from nineteenth-century woodblock prints to contemporary art made with AI, and one recurring question: what do people ask of the monsters they invent?
A speculative genealogy
The idea came from Doryun Chong, M+’s artistic director and chief curator. He describes the museum, which opened in 2021, as devoted to contemporary visual culture rather than art alone. His precedent was MoMA’s “Fantastic Art, Dada, Surrealism” of 1936. Almost a century later, he wanted to put a similar question to a broader visual culture that takes in design, architecture and the moving image. His second starting point was manga and anime, Japanese forms that reinvented comics and animation so thoroughly that the words entered global use. What fed them, and what did they go on to feed?
Takemiya Keiko, Toi hoshi no kioku (Memories of a Distant Star), from Toward the Terra, 1977–1980, print on paper. Kyoto Seika University International Manga Research Center/Kyoto International Manga Museum. © Takemiya Keiko
Chong calls the resulting method a “speculative genealogy”, and the adjective matters. This is a proposed lineage, not a proven one. “If you had different curators, they might choose different kinds of things,” he says. Tam and Ulanda Blair (moving image) made the idea their own over about two years, working with 47 lenders and 37 licensors.
The real test, then, is what happens when a museum draws a line between images made centuries apart. The show bets that they share more than their power to astonish.
From grief to Godzilla
The exhibition opens with nineteenth-century Japanese woodblock prints and Tibetan Buddhist scrolls, where monsters and spirits offered a way into grief, fear and other difficult subjects. The Nue, a Japanese chimera, has a monkey’s face, a raccoon dog’s body, a tiger’s limbs and a snake’s tail. Its strange anatomy, an unsettling mix of the familiar and the unknown, gives shape to fears that are hard to put into words.
Utagawa Kuniyoshi, The Sixty-Nine Stations of the Kisokaidō: Kyoto, Nue, Taibi (The End), 1852, mult Unknown (Tibet), Raudrantaka Mahakala, nineteenth century, distemper on cloth. Collection of Fabio R
Utagawa Kuniyoshi, The Sixty-Nine Stations of the Kisokaidō: Kyoto, Nue, Taibi (The End), 1852, multicolour woodblock print on paper. Yumoto Koichi Memorial JAPAN YOKAI MUSEUM (Miyoshi Mononoke Museum). Image courtesy of Yumoto Koichi Memorial JAPAN YOKAI MUSEUM (Miyoshi Mononoke Museum)
Unknown (Tibet), Raudrantaka Mahakala, nineteenth century, distemper on cloth. Collection of Fabio Rossi. Image courtesy Rossi & Rossi
The next chapter turns to Surrealism and how Asian artists adapted it to their own cultural and political circumstances. The show does not cast Asia as a recipient of European ideas. It presents these artists as active participants in a modern art history built across borders. “They always made what they received their own,” Chong says. Fantasy, the works suggest, was never a fixed visual language; artists reshaped it to meet the anxieties of their own time.
Salvador Dalí, Dormeuse, cheval, lion (Invisible Sleeping Woman, Horse, Lion), 1930, oil on canvas. Koga Harue, Scene in the Deep Sea, 1933, oil on canvas. Ohara Museum of Art, Ohara Art Foundation, K
Salvador Dalí, Dormeuse, cheval, lion (Invisible Sleeping Woman, Horse, Lion), 1930, oil on canvas. Pola Museum of Art. © Salvador Dalí, Fundació Gala-Salvador Dalí / ADAGP, Paris. Image courtesy of Pola Museum of Art
Koga Harue, Scene in the Deep Sea, 1933, oil on canvas. Ohara Museum of Art, Ohara Art Foundation, Kurashiki. Image courtesy of Ohara Art Foundation
From there the show moves into popular culture, where monsters become entangled with technology. Godzilla, born of Japan’s experience of nuclear devastation, embodies the destructive potential of human ingenuity. Astro Boy offers a more hopeful vision of progress. Together they capture the double edge of machines: the power to create and protect, and the capacity to destroy. “Godzilla was already warning us about humans’ relationship with technology,” Chong says.
Poster, Godzilla, 1954, print on paper. TM & © TOHO Shōnen October special issue, Astro Boy, 1959, print on paper. © TEZUKA PRODUCTIONS
Poster, Godzilla, 1954, print on paper. TM & © TOHO
Shōnen October special issue, Astro Boy, 1959, print on paper. © TEZUKA PRODUCTIONS
The Ghost in the Shell franchise complicates the picture. Its merging of human and machine raises questions about consciousness, identity and what remains of the self when the body is no longer entirely human. The exhibition follows these creations from their original designs to the films, anime and manga that carried them around the world. Fantasy travels between media as readily as between cultures.
Imagining the present
The final chapter belongs to contemporary artists, who use fantasy not just to revisit familiar myths but to imagine other ways of understanding the present. Takashi Murakami, Cao Fei, Ho Tzu Nyen, KongKee, Ayoung Kim and LuYang draw on monsters, spirits and speculative worlds to explore identity, technology and alternative realities. Fear Catcher, a mural by Hong Kong artist Oscar Chan Yik Long commissioned for the show, brings that language into the building itself. A digital game, Fantastical Planet, hands the question to visitors by inviting them to invent creatures of their own. Making a monster becomes a way to ask what it might express: a fear, a desire, or a vision of a world that does not yet exist.
Cao Fei, Golden Fighter's Despair, from Cosplayers series, 2004, inkjet print on paper. Courtesy of Ayoung Kim, Dancer in the Mirror Field, 2026, single-channel digital video (colour, sound). © Ayoung LuYang, Poster, Uterus Man, 2013. © LuYang. Image courtesy of artist Ho Tzu Nyen, Publicity poster for Night March of Hundred Monsters, 2025. © Ho Tzu Nyen. Image courte
Cao Fei, Golden Fighter's Despair, from Cosplayers series, 2004, inkjet print on paper. Courtesy of the artist, Vitamin Creative Space and Sprüth Magers. © Cao Fei. Image courtesy of artist and Vitamin Creative Space
Ayoung Kim, Dancer in the Mirror Field, 2026, single-channel digital video (colour, sound). © Ayoung Kim. Still: Courtesy of the artist
LuYang, Poster, Uterus Man, 2013. © LuYang. Image courtesy of artist
Ho Tzu Nyen, Publicity poster for Night March of Hundred Monsters, 2025. © Ho Tzu Nyen. Image courtesy of the artist and Kiang Malingue
Protection in four directions
The show closes with four paintings by Takashi Murakami, all made in 2024: Flaming Vermilion Bird, Blue Dragon Soars Through the Universe, Black Tortoise and Arhats and White Tiger and Family. Their four guardian beasts come from East Asian cosmology, where each is associated with a cardinal point. Together they suggest a balance between creative vitality and restraining power, and between spiritual wisdom and protective cosmic forces. Murakami combines the colourful decorative tradition of Japanese painting with AI-generated images and elements drawn from his earlier work.
Blair says Murakami uses the technology to comment on how fantastical image-making has always worked. “For hundreds and thousands of years, different artists have imagined mythical beings that don’t actually exist, and today our machines are doing the same thing.”
It is a comment on that history, not a verdict on the technology. It also closes a circle. The first gallery’s wall text speaks of a desire for safety and protection, and the last works offer protection in four directions.
The genealogy is speculative, as Chong readily admits. But the exhibition makes a persuasive case that Asia’s monsters have never belonged to entertainment alone. They are records of what people feared, what they hoped to protect, and what they imagined technology might become.
Myths and Monsters: The Art of Fantasy in Asia M+, West Kowloon Cultural District, Hong Kong 17 October 2026 – 4 April 2027
