HONG KONG – If you find yourself walking along Victoria Harbour this spring, look up. Stretching across the M+ Facade after dark is 3 to 12 Nautical Miles, a hypnotic new animation by Shahzia Sikander that turns centuries of global trade, empire, and maritime power into a slow-moving, painterly spectacle.

Made from hand-painted watercolours and animated on a monumental scale, the work feels both intimate and vast. Figures, ships, fragments of landscapes, and symbolic gestures float in and out of view, tracing the routes that once linked India, China, and Britain through commerce and conflict. The title refers to shifting maritime boundaries, a reminder that the sea, like power itself, is never as fixed as it seems.

Sikander’s starting point is the nineteenth century, when trade routes hardened into imperial control. The animation touches on the decline of Mughal rule in India, the pressures facing Qing China, and the rise of the British East India Company, including the devastating opium trade that reshaped economies and lives across Asia. Rather than telling this history straight, Sikander lets it unfold in layers: images dissolve, overlap, and return, refusing a single point of view.

Seen from across the harbour, the work transforms the M+ Facade into something like a moving manuscript. Delicate brushstrokes are magnified to architectural scale, and watercolour — a medium associated with fragility and flow — becomes a quiet stand-in for the sea itself. Ships glide, borders blur, and authority appears momentary, unstable, and porous.

There’s something especially fitting about encountering 3 to 12 Nautical Miles in Hong Kong, a city shaped by maritime exchange and colonial legacies. The animation doesn’t lecture or explain; instead, it invites a slower kind of looking. You can drop in for a few minutes or stay with it as the imagery drifts past, letting history surface in fragments rather than facts.

3 to 12 Nautical Miles is the kind of artwork that rewards repeat encounters, a reminder that the stories beneath global trade routes are as fluid, contested, and unresolved as the waters they once crossed.

Photos Courtesy of the artist

3 to 12 Nautical Miles will be presented nightly on the M+ Facade from 23rd March to 21st June 2026, More information available here