Shahzia Sikander on M+ facade

A nine-minute film about sea power, empire, and trade is now playing across one of Hong Kong’s biggest public screens. Pakistani American artist Shahzia Sikander’s 3 to 12 Nautical Miles is being shown nightly on the 110-metre-wide light-emitting diode facade of M+, the museum of visual culture in West Kowloon, turning the side of the building into a moving argument about who controlled Asian waters, ports, and commerce. (mplus.org.hk) The work arrives with unusual visibility because the M+ facade faces Victoria Harbour, one of the most symbolically loaded trade routes in the city. Instead of using that scale for spectacle alone, Sikander uses it to project hand-painted imagery about imperial expansion, maritime borders, and the long afterlife of colonial trade systems in Hong Kong. (theartnewspaper.com) (mplus.org.hk) The title comes from a legal and geopolitical shift at sea. For centuries, many states treated three nautical miles from shore as the limit of territorial waters, roughly the distance a shore cannon could defend, but modern maritime law expanded that claim to 12 nautical miles, making the title a compact way of talking about how power gets measured, enforced, and redrawn. (theartnewspaper.com) That framing matters in Hong Kong because the city’s history was built through shipping, imperial law, and unequal trade. Sikander’s film links the British East India Company, Mughal India, and Qing China, tracing the commercial and military networks that moved goods across Asia while also moving violence, hierarchy, and foreign control. (mplus.org.hk) (artasiapacific.com) M+ says the animation was built from hand-painted images, which is central to how Sikander works. She first became known for reworking the visual language of South Asian miniature painting, then stretching that careful, intimate format into murals, video, and animation that can carry political history into contemporary public space. (artbasel.com) (scmp.com) That tension between scale and detail is part of the point here. A medium associated with close looking and courtly refinement is blown up to architectural size, so images tied to older empires now confront a city whose skyline, harbor, and financial identity were shaped by imperial commerce. (artsy.net) (theartnewspaper.com) The commission also sits inside a larger institutional partnership. 3 to 12 Nautical Miles was co-commissioned by M+ and Art Basel, presented by UBS, and marks the fifth consecutive year that the museum and the art fair have collaborated on activating the facade during the week of Art Basel Hong Kong. (mplus.org.hk) (artbasel.com) That Art Basel connection helps explain why the piece drew immediate attention. During a week dominated by fairs, sales, and private viewing rooms, Sikander’s film stood out as a moving-image work that could not be reduced to a booth object, because it was visible to the public every night outside the fair itself. (scmp.com) (artbasel.com) The imagery is rooted in research rather than loose metaphor. Materials about the project say Sikander drew on China trade art and research conducted at the Hong Kong Museum of Art and the Hong Kong Maritime Museum, grounding the animation in the specific visual culture of ships, merchants, coastlines, and exchange rather than in a generic anti-colonial statement. (skny.com) (mplus.org.hk) The result is less a history lesson than a public re-staging of historical memory. Hong Kong residents and visitors see the work in a place usually associated with tourism, luxury towers, and harbor views, but the film uses that same setting to recall the shipping lanes and imperial bargains that made the modern city possible. (scmp.com) (theartnewspaper.com) There is also a sharper edge in the title’s focus on maritime limits. A line drawn at sea can look abstract on a map, but in practice it decides who can police a coast, tax a route, exploit a resource, or claim a corridor of movement, and Sikander turns that legal boundary into an image of empire’s changing reach. (theartnewspaper.com) (e-flux.com) M+ began screening the work on March 23, 2026, and plans to continue nightly showings through June 21, 2026. The museum has also paired the facade commission with free screenings of Sikander’s earlier animations inside M+ Cinema, extending the project beyond a single outdoor image and into a broader presentation of her moving-image practice. (mplus.org.hk) (e-flux.com) What makes 3 to 12 Nautical Miles land so strongly in Hong Kong is not just its size or timing. It takes a museum facade built for visibility and uses it to ask a city shaped by ports, treaties, and foreign trade to look directly at the imperial machinery that once organized the harbor below. (scmp.com) (mplus.org.hk)