[2] The museum is intended to rival the Tate Modern, New York's MoMA and the Centre Pompidou in terms of the breadth and importance of its collections.

[3] The HK$5.9 billion[4] institution is led by Museum Director Suhanya Raffel since January 2019 and administered by the West Kowloon Cultural District Authority (WKCDA).

[6] After an architectural competition, six finalists for the design of the M+ museum were announced in 2012, namely Herzog & de Meuron and Farrells, Kazuyo Sejima and Ryue Nishizawa (SANAA), Renzo Piano Building Workshop, Shigeru Ban and Thomas Chow Architects, Snøhetta, and Toyo Ito and Benoy.

[8] As part of the Masterplan for the West Kowloon Cultural District designed by Foster + Partners,[9] the architects proposed incorporating the use of underground "found space", referring to the space surrounding the Airport Railway tunnels running directly beneath the site, as a "radical" subterranean exhibition and performance area.

[10] The building's design has the basic appearance of an upside-down T. The main horizontal slab housing exhibition spaces is lifted off the ground, permitting pedestrian circulation underneath.

[11][12] In addition to the interior space, an LED lighting display system is integrated into the facade, serving as a gigantic screen for works of art, visible across Victoria Harbour.

[18] "Mobile M+: NEONSIGNS.HK" (2014) is an online exhibition of Hong Kong's neon signage, an iconic feature of the city yet one which the museum noted is "fast disappearing".

"[22] On 12 June 2012, Uli Sigg, a Swiss collector of the reportedly largest and most comprehensive collection of contemporary Chinese art in the world, announced that he would donate the majority of his holdings to M+.

[24] Sigg stated that he selected the Hong Kong museum over one in Mainland China because the collection includes works by artists suppressed by the Chinese government, for example 26 pieces by Ai Weiwei.

[27] In 2013, the museum announced that it had acquired the "most comprehensive collection [...] by a public institution" of the performance art of New York City-based Taiwanese artist Tehching Hsieh.

[28][29] In 2019, the museum acquired the entire archive of influential British architecture collective Archigram, despite purported attempts to block the sale to an overseas buyer.