About the M+ API


Background

M+ is building a collection of twentieth and twenty-first century visual culture, encompassing the disciplines of design and architecture, moving image, and visual art, grounded in Hong Kong with a global perspective. Geographically, the collections cover Hong Kong, mainland China, and regions across Asia and beyond. The M+ Collections are composed of the M+ Collection, the M+ Sigg Collection, and the M+ Collection Archives.

M+ is embracing open access and working towards releasing as much of our collections metadata as possible. Our goal is to unlock the museum’s institutional knowledge and release it into the public domain, driven by M+’s mission as a public institution. Read more about our open access journey here and here.

We’ve released an open data set on GitHub, but are also sharing our data through a public API to help increase access and encourage creative projects. The M+ API will be available for anyone who’d like to work with it. It’s for developers, designers, artists, creators—anyone who’s curious about telling stories through data.

The M+ API is built using GraphQL and will continue to be updated as new data becomes available. The documentation available here will also be updated periodically.

Please contact us here with any questions regarding the API.

The Data

The data made available to you through this API service is a reflection of institutional knowledge developed over time at M+. This data has been created by curators, registrars, researchers, and scholars working in collaboration with M+ to describe, express, and interpret the objects held in the M+ Collections. This data is made available to you, the public, both as CC0 Open Data and through this API service, for use by your websites, applications, and research projects.

This data is provided ‘as is’ for research purposes and you may use it at your own risk. Documentation of the museum’s collection is an ongoing process and we are continuing to research and enrich our collections data. We will update the dataset with new and revised information on a regular basis. M+ makes no representations or warranties of any kind on this data.

Technical Documentation and Access

To access this API, you must register for an account. All calls to the API require an API key, which will be granted to you upon registration. For information on making use of this API, please see the technical documentation made available here.