WHEN SWISS COLLECTOR Uli Sigg donated the bulk of his holdings of contemporary Chinese art to the fledgling M+ in Hong Kong in June 2012, it was more than just another gift by a leading collector to his or her favored museum. Sigg’s largesse—he contributed 1,463 objects, valued at $170 million—instantly transformed M+ from an institution in planning into a global player. In the process, it canonized a list of artists whose previous successes had been mainly commercial, and enshrined a narrative of China’s recent art history as a dialectical push from the haze of the Cultural Revolution

Cédric Maridet’s “Fragments of Future Histories” felt like a slick steampunk take on contemporary exploration. The exhibition of photographs, videos, assemblages, and kinetic sculptures opened with Rise, Fall, 2016, an acrylic tank, placed on a wooden pedestal, comprising four compartments filled with distilled water, ethanol, camphor, potassium nitrate, and ammonium chloride. This chemical admixture resulted in white, snowflake-like formations of crystals that adhered to the acrylic walls, sat on the surface of the water, and gathered at the bottom of the tank. An LED placed in the vessel’s