Officials expect the $640 million, government-funded museum to stand peer to peer with contemporary art icons such
as the Museum of Modern Art in New York City, the Pompidou Center in Paris and the Tate Modern in London.
“The threat to freedom of expression does exist, not only to M+
but all cultural institutions and media organizations in Hong Kong,” said Vivienne Chow, an art and culture critic and founding director of the nonprofit Cultural Journalism Campus in Hong Kong.
Officials from the authority declined to discuss the issue, but stressed
that they had seen “continuous good progress on the construction of M+ over the past two years.”
The museum will look like a giant inverted T. “The upside-down T is simple,” Doryun
Chong, M+’s deputy director and chief curator, said in an interview this year.
“I have no doubt that M+ will be a museum of absolute world class,” Mr. Nittve said.
Suhanya Raffel, the new executive director of M+, is the former director of collections at the Art Gallery of New South Wales in Australia.