Beyond Digital Boundaries: Embodied Experience and Narrative Practice in the Exhibition Spaces of M+ Museum, Hong Kong

Abstract

Although contemporary museums are increasingly incorporating digital technologies in exhibition design, there is mounting evidence that visitors would like to engage in ways that transcend what screens and interfaces can achieve. This study investigates the relationship between digital mediation and bodily experience in the exhibition rooms of M+ Museum, Hong Kong, Asia’s first global museum of modern visual culture. The study draws on Merleau-Ponty's phenomenology of embodiment and de Certeau's theory of spatial narrative practice to analyse qualitative data collected through ethnographic observation, semi-structured visitor interviews (N = 24) and spatial analysis of M+'s permanent and temporary exhibition design. The three main findings are: (1) Visitors actively negotiate digital and physical thresholds, selectively disengaging from screen-mediated content when bodily presence offers a more immediate aesthetic access; (2) Narrative coherence in the exhibition design of M+ is critically dependent on material and spatial anchors and not digital continuity; and (3) Visitors act as co-authors of exhibition meaning through embodied movement and selective attention. The findings show that the embodied character of the museum experience is a kind of resistance to digital saturation and that narrative practice—understood as the active spatial tale visitors build via movement—should be considered a core design concept. The paper contributes to museum studies, exhibition design theory and digital heritage scholarship by recentring embodied experience as the irreducible basis of meaningful museum engagement.