The Best Things to Do in Hong Kong This Week

EXO bring EXO PLANET #6 — EXhOrizon to AsiaWorld for two nights, and it is comfortably the biggest live ticket of the week. More than a decade in, the SM Entertainment veterans still put on the kind of precision-drilled, pyro-heavy K-pop spectacle that fills a 14,000-seat arena twice over. If you're not an EXO-L, the standing pit is where the energy lives; if you are, you bought your tickets back in March. Either way, get out to Chek Lap Kok early — the Airport Express funnels the whole arena onto one platform afterwards, and you do not want to be at the back of that queue.

If you do one cultural thing this week, make it this. "Blooming: The Art of Gardens in East and West" has quietly pulled off a coup — Claude Monet's Water Lilies (1906) and Water Lily Pond (1900) are here on loan from the Art Institute of Chicago, hanging a few rooms from Qing imperial garden paintings and treasures from Beijing's Palace Museum and the Palace of Versailles. It's free, it is rarely this easy to stand in front of a real Monet in Hong Kong, and the crowds will only build as word gets around. Go on a weekday morning, before the tour groups.

Still the show of the year at M+. The Korean artist's survey — giant cyborg sculptures, mirrored infinity rooms, those crumpled silver landscapes that look like collapsed utopias — rewards a slow, second visit even if you caught it back in spring. Over 200 works, presented with Seoul's Leeum Museum of Art, and some of the most formally ambitious art on a wall anywhere in Asia right now. Time your ticket for a Tuesday or Wednesday afternoon when the school groups have thinned out.

The M+ tribute to the late Ryuichi Sakamoto closes on July 5, so this is one of your last few weekends with it. It's a genuinely moving piece of curation: sound-and-light installations built around the YMO co-founder and Oscar-winning composer's life's work, best experienced with as few other people in the room as possible. Pair it with Lee Bul one floor away and make a proper afternoon of West Kowloon — the rooftop terrace and harbour view are free either way.

The Wednesday-night meeting under the floodlights is about as Hong Kong as an evening gets — tens of thousands of people, eight races, cold lager in plastic cups, and the lit apartment towers of the valley rising behind the home straight. This week's edition runs a "Racing with Football" theme, but honestly you go for the atmosphere, not the gimmick. At HKD 10 on the gate, the public enclosure is the best-value night out in the city. Our full Happy Valley racing guide has the tactics and the food stalls worth finding.

Hong Kong's first "art collection card" show takes over PMQ until June 21: ten local and overseas artists shrinking their work down to palm-sized, swappable cards you can actually take home. It's a clever, low-stakes way into collecting for anyone intimidated by the Art Basel circuit — and the heritage-block courtyards of the former Police Married Quarters are a pleasant wander in their own right. Free to look, cheap to start a collection.

Out in Sha Tin, the Heritage Museum is showing original Leonardo da Vinci manuscripts alongside more than 100 Renaissance works on loan from European institutions. It's a proper blockbuster that has flown slightly under the radar thanks to its unglamorous New Territories address — which is exactly why it's far less of a scrum than the same show would be on Hong Kong Island. Worth the East Rail trip; pair it with the Che Kung Temple next door and a Sha Tin dim-sum lunch.

A restored 18th-century Hakka walled village turns into a two-day celebration of Hong Kong's ethnic-minority cultures this weekend: Hakka folk-song duets, Indian festival workshops, shadow-puppet shows, patterned band-weaving and Chiu Chow kung-fu tea, with guided tours led by the village chief himself. It's free, genuinely charming, and one of the better family outings in the New Territories this month — and the museum itself, a Qing-dynasty clan compound tucked behind the Tsuen Wan towers, is worth the trip alone.

Runway's annual fashion show and night market sets up at The Hive in Kennedy Town on Saturday evening — local designers, small-batch labels, live performances and the reliably good-natured K-Town creative crowd. Go to shop independent and support the small makers, stay for the drinks, then walk it off along the Kennedy Town praya as the sun drops behind the container terminals. It's the western tip of the island at its most likeable.

This is the week to plan your Dragon Boat. Tuen Ng falls on Friday June 19 — a public holiday — and the drums are already out across the harbour as teams put in their last training paddles. The marquee races are at Stanley Main Beach (150-plus teams, 8am–5pm), with smaller and often more atmospheric heats at Aberdeen, Sha Tin's Shing Mun River, Sai Kung and the stilt-house village of Tai O. Read our full Dragon Boat Festival guide and pick your spot now — Stanley's little beach fills up fast, so go early or commit to a quieter heat.

June is the threshold of typhoon season, so grab the next clear, signal-free day and get out to Sai Kung before the rain settles in for the summer. Pick your fish straight from the tanks along the waterfront, hop a kaito (small licensed ferry) to a quieter beach on one of the outlying islands, and be back in town by dusk. It's the antidote to a week spent ducking between air-conditioned malls — and a useful reminder that Hong Kong is mostly country park and sea once you leave the skyline behind.