Five years ago, Swiss architects Herzog & De Meuron completed Tai Kwun in Hong Kong, a former British police station and prison-cell compound turned cultural centre. If ever there was a building haunted by the ghosts of a colonial past, this was it: a dense network of structures of control set around prison yards and parade grounds. Their newer building M+, which bills itself as “Asia’s first global museum of visual culture”, is almost its exact opposite.

Sited in a landscape reclaimed from the water, across the harbour from Hong Kong Island on Kowloon, it sits on virgin territory, unfreighted by history or ruins. The architects, desperate to find a foothold, managed to locate something below ground, an archaeology of engineering on which to anchor the new institution. Its basement is a diagonal void, the indicator of the presence of the Airport Express train line directly below, an attempt to make visible the otherwise invisible, the engineering of complex infrastructure. The dramatic void, a concrete cavern to recall the same architects’ Turbine Hall at Tate Modern, is referred to as the “Found Space”, though they clearly had to work quite hard to find it.

Like all museums, though, M+ is nothing if not a repository of memory. Even in its architecture it embodies a sense of Hong Kong’s particular condition as a city of towers in which the individual structures are often generic, banal even, yet which collectively come together to create a cityscape of awe-inspiring modernity.

M+, which opened in 2021 but has had a post-lockdown relaunch, sits on the edge of the West Kowloon Cultural District and was conceived as an Asian MoMA. But since the architectural competition in 2012, culture in Hong Kong has been radically politicised, highlighted by the censoring of a work by Ai Weiwei. A number of more self-consciously expressive buildings, including the twee Hong Kong Palace Museum and the irresistibly ghastly Xiqu Centre for Chinese Opera, represent the shift towards the mainland, the imposition of a more traditional Chinese cultural agenda to counterbalance the liberal globalism of M+. Yet despite the politics, the new museum accommodates a genuinely thrilling mix of art, architecture, pop culture, moving image and design.

From the uncertain, emerging art of the post-socialist realist era to the rich kitsch of Hong Kong’s manufacturing, movie and printing industries of the 1970s and 1980s, it contains a superb survey of Asia’s modern and contemporary art in all its early clunkiness and exuberance, then in its increasing confidence, influence and richness of expression.

The building itself (originally estimated at HK$5.9bn (US$750mn( but now considerably, unknowably more) is a throwback to a certain kind of mid-century architecture, a slab and podium, a type familiar from New York’s Park Avenue where they were first designed to create airier blocks amid the dense canyons of stone-clad skyscrapers. The podium is open from all sides, deliberately permeable; its terrace has one of the best views of the city, gazing back at the old Hong Kong.

The vast expanse of the ground floor is architecturally striking — albeit a little bleak. Escalators slowly deposit visitors upstairs to the collections housed in a series of galleries (33 in all) around an atrium. It is a vast, exhausting survey of mostly Asian Modernism. Its aim to reorient our understanding of contemporary global cultural production is as epic as the spaces mapped out to contain it, and mostly enjoyable and engaging.

If much of the art is now familiar, that does not mean it has been well represented elsewhere. Including the collection of Uli Sigg, former Swiss ambassador to China and early adopter of Chinese contemporary art, this is an ambitious refocusing. The way in which the curators have interspersed the art with graphics and design, high and low, class and kitsch together, results in an irresistibly exuberant display.

The architecture exhibits, elsewhere often relegated to an afterthought, are here among the most prominent and memorable. An entire interior of a sushi bar designed by cult Japanese designer Shiro Kuramata is a vivid throwback to the 1980s, when the west was worried about Japanese world domination. A replica of Gary Chang’s Domestic Transformer is a brilliant mobile interior which allowed a typically tight Hong Kong apartment to be instantly reconfigured with a gentle pull of a sliding wall. The garish colours of pop magazines gleam beside tourist brochures and avant-garde graphics, cheesy plastic lampshades from the 1960s beside exquisite modernist chairs.

A Yayoi Kusama exhibit provides the compulsory Insta-moment in its infinite mirror box. I was gently admonished by astonished attendants for not taking a picture. I had clearly misunderstood the brief.

There were inevitable concerns about the impact of the National Security Law on artistic expression and these have lingered. But there appear to be plenty of works here with political intent, overt or sly. The management line, reiterated at the press conference, is that any institution must remain within the law. Clearly there is a delicate line to tread, but the first impression here is not one of nervousness or fear, rather of an explosion of expression and an appreciation, rather than a politically motivated remaking, of the nuances of history.

If the visitor’s eyes are focused firmly on the artworks here, it is because the galleries have been designed not to get in the way. There are few architectural gymnastics, no look-at-me moments. Instead a series of rooms is given subtly different expression through material (concrete, timber, bamboo), light (natural top lit, windows or black box) and scale. The one exception is the structural bravura needed to overcome the self-imposed “Found Space” over the railway tracks, an architectural move necessitating a huge amount of questionable steel and concrete.

Above it all, an elevated terrace, tropically landscaped, presents another panoramic platform, its views framed by over-manicured, if still lush tropical vegetation. The simple, slender modernist slab rising above contains, a little disappointingly, offices and admin. From this platform a visitor can survey that landscape of banal buildings massed into something spectacular. This fine-grained, deceptively simple structure is anything but generic, and in its simple composition and that allusion to mid-century corporate elegance, it projects back to the city an image of itself just as it consumes those endless images inside.