The best thing at M+ this summer costs nothing and does not require you to leave the house. Ring +852 3009-9386 and a Hong Kong poet will read you a poem — picked at random, in Cantonese, English or Mandarin, with no menu, no app and no explanation. That is Dial-A-Poem Hong Kong (致電一首詩．香港), and it closes on 30 August 2026.
In This Guide
What is Dial-A-Poem Hong Kong?
It is an exhibition you can experience entirely through a telephone. In the Focus Gallery on Level 2, M+ has installed telephone sculptures. You lift a handset and a poem plays — chosen at random from the archive, in whichever language it was recorded. There is no track list and no way to request a particular writer. You take what you are given.
The Hong Kong edition features readings in Cantonese, English and Mandarin, which M+ describes as newly recorded in the original language by thirty local poets. That trilingual spread is the point: M+ explicitly invites you to listen to the sound and rhythm of a poem even if you do not understand the language, then dial again for another. It is an unusually generous instruction for a museum to give.
And here is the part that makes this worth writing about at all: the line is public. M+ publishes the number — +852 3009-9386 — and anyone can call it from their own phone, from a bus, from Sheung Wan, from another country. The exhibition, in its most essential form, is free and open to everyone with a phone. That is an unusually literal answer to the question of what a museum is for.
John Giorno and the 1969 original
Dial-A-Poem was not invented for M+ — it is a 57-year-old idea. The poet John Giorno (American, 1936–2019) started it in 1969 with a simple aim: get poetry out of books and into everyday life. His conviction, quoted by M+, was that "much poetry is intended to be heard, not merely read". He invited writers, artists and musicians to contribute works that anyone could reach by ringing a hotline.
It worked, loudly. The project later hardened into a gallery form — banks of telephone sculptures playing randomly selected readings — and in recent years has travelled, with versions built in France, Mexico and Brazil, each showcasing local makers in their own languages. Hong Kong now joins that list, which is a quietly significant thing: this is the city's poetry, on Giorno's terms, in Giorno's format.
The thirty poets
The roster spans generations of Hong Kong writing, and it is deliberately broad rather than canonical. It includes Bei Dao, Yau Ching, Tammy Lai-Ming Ho, Nicholas Wong, Jennifer Wong, Derek Chung, Liu Wai Tong, Lok Fung, Louise Law, Tim Tim Cheng, the musician Olivier Cong, and Eric Yip — who won the National Poetry Competition at twenty with a poem about Cantonese and English that a lot of Hong Kong took personally.
It also lists Leung Ping Kwan and Xixi, two of the most important figures in modern Hong Kong letters — and both, notably, no longer living; Leung Ping-kwan died in 2013. So while M+ frames the project as newly recorded readings by thirty poets, the roster plainly reaches back into the archive as well as into the recording booth. M+ does not spell out on the exhibition page how each reading was sourced, and we are not going to guess. What it does say is that the poems "are played randomly from the archive" — which is the honest description of what you will hear.
Dial-A-Poem Hong Kong — the essentials
| Detail | Information |
|---|---|
| Exhibition | Dial-A-Poem Hong Kong (致電一首詩．香港) |
| Dates | 25 April – 30 August 2026 |
| Gallery | Focus Gallery, Level 2, M+ |
| The phone line | +852 3009-9386 — call from anywhere, free |
| Languages | Cantonese, English, Mandarin (played at random) |
| Admission | Standard M+ ticket HKD 190 · concession HKD 100 |
Per the official M+ exhibition page and the M+ admission page, July 2026.
Tickets, hours and getting there
Be clear about what is free and what is not. The phone line is free. The gallery is not: Dial-A-Poem sits in the Focus Gallery, inside the museum's ticketed Level 2 galleries, so seeing the telephone sculptures needs a standard M+ ticket at HKD 190, or HKD 100 concession. Children aged six and under do not need a ticket, and M+ Members and Patrons get unlimited admission.
Two practical notes. M+ now runs timed session tickets — morning, afternoon and night — valid from 10 July 2026, so you choose a slot when booking rather than drifting in. And a good chunk of the building is free anyway: the Mediatheque, the Grand Stair (outside ticketed events), B1, B2, Found Space and the Roof Garden all cost nothing, which makes a phone-call-plus-Roof-Garden afternoon a genuinely free day out.
M+ — Visitor Info
Ticket prices and free-access zones per the M+ admission page. M+ adjusts hours for public holidays and special events — confirm before you travel. The Airport Express also stops at Kowloon Station.
Is it worth a trip?
Call the number first. Then decide. That is not a dodge — it is the only exhibition in Hong Kong where you can sample the entire artistic proposition for free, from where you are sitting, in about ninety seconds. If a random poem in a language you may not speak lands for you, the gallery will land harder: the telephone sculptures give the thing a body, and hearing it in a quiet room among strangers is a different experience from hearing it on a minibus.
If it does nothing for you, you have saved HKD 190 and learned something. Either way, the line stays open until the show closes on 30 August 2026.
Dial-A-Poem is one of several shows closing at M+ this summer — Lee Bul: From 1998 to Now ends on 9 August, while Heri Dono: Fermentation of the Mind and Wael Shawky: I Am Hymns of the New Temples both run to 25 October. Our round-up of M+ exhibitions tracks the full programme, and the best art exhibitions in Hong Kong this summer sets it all in season.
Frequently Asked Questions
Ring +852 3009-9386
It is free, it takes ninety seconds, and it is the only exhibition in town you can try before you buy. Dial-A-Poem Hong Kong closes 30 August 2026.