He Jianfeng, the museum’s founder, is the son of He Xiangjian, the billionaire who built Midea into the world’s largest appliance maker (and sponsor of newly minted English FA Cup winner and Premier League champions Manchester City).

Once past the museum entrance, which features Ukrainian artist Stanislava Pinchuk’s The Wine Dark Sea (2021), seen at this year’s Art Basel Hong Kong fair, the imposing design of the glass and concrete building makes it clear why museum director Shao Shu has to consider whether the art on show can stand up to the architecture.

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But the director has no doubts about the Horn show. “Roni’s works do not get overwhelmed by the building,” he says.

The most eye-catching part of the building – and where most of the exhibition space is housed – is a circular stack of discs with a magnificent double helix spiral staircase in the centre.

Apart from a minimal number of V-shaped concrete pillars, each vast gallery floor is completely bare of walls – there is 86,000 square feet (8,000 square metres) of exhibition space in total – and customised partitions are erected for every exhibition.

With the tongue-in-cheek, faintly Taoist title “A dream dreamt in a dreaming world is not really a dream … but a dream not dreamt is”, Horn’s show is full of ambiguity and surprises. Its scale gives a good representation of the artist’s diverse practice, which includes sculpture, photography, drawing and books.

With 50 works sourced from international collections and the artist herself, it is the largest retrospective that 67-year-old Horn, born in New York in 1955, has had in Asia.

The load-bearing capacity of the building allows for the installation of her formidably heavy “Water Double” series. These round columns of solid glass weigh 4,500kg (8,800lb) each and stand 1.3 metres (four feet) high.

Made between 2013 and 2019, the columns resemble large, uncovered water butts with a top surface so smooth it is hard to believe they are not filled with water.

The water illusion itself is part of Horn’s fascination with paradoxes and “inbetweenness”.

“What you end up with is an object that is both liquid and solid visually. You have an identity that shares both worlds,” she said during an opening talk she gave at the museum.

The range of the exhibition is vast: there are text bars covered in lines from Emily Dickinson’s poems, photographic sequences that play with the idea of doubling, projects that conceptually challenge the distinction between landscapes and portraits, and of course, images of Horn’s beloved second home, Iceland.

At the heart of many of the works is the Greek philosopher Heraclitus’ idea that you can’t step into the same river twice (because both the person and the river are always changing).

Things That Happen Again (1986/2010) is a pair of identical copper cones shown resting on two pieces of wood and placed in separate sections of the circular museum. Visitors inevitably do a double take when they encounter the second one.

You Are the Weather, Part 2 (2010-11) is a sequence of 100 near-identical photographs of a former girlfriend called Margrit, who Horn photographed in exactly the same manner in 1994.

There is one work where Horn allows a fragile promise of eternity to seep through. Gold Mats, Paired – for Ross and Felix (1994/2021) is made of two extremely thin sheets of pure gold, one on top of the other, representing Horn’s friend, the artist Felix Gonzalez-Torres, and his lover Ross Laycock, who both died of Aids-related illnesses.

It is placed on its own, near a window so that it reflects the watery sun, unadorned by artificial lightning, and is profoundly moving.

Shao, like many artists and curators in Guangdong province, says he goes to Hong Kong regularly to see exhibitions.

Now that the borders have reopened, Hongkongers can reciprocate. Apparently the Joseph Beuys exhibition at Shenzhen’s Design Society, organised by How Art Museum, is worth a visit too.