Hong Kong museum bosses got raises as district that runs them opened $1B borrowing program

Executives at Hong Kong's two flagship museums were paid more than HK$20 million combined last fiscal year. Pay for the four executives at the M+ contemporary art museum rose 3.6%, government figures released this month show.

The wave of government-backed cultural districts that reshaped Asia and the Persian Gulf is entering a more difficult phase.

In the past year, cultural institutions in Hong Kong have turned to debt, Singapore's flagship museum asked the public for donations, and Qatar and the United Arab Emirates — still opening museums — saw a regional war shutter theirs and postpone art fairs.

“There are a total of seven senior executives in the two museums of the [West Kowloon Cultural District], with the total remuneration expenditure amounting to approximately HK$20.9 million in 2025-26,” Hong Kong Culture Secretary Rosanna Law told lawmakers earlier this month, according to a press release.

“When determining the pay adjustment, the WKCDA takes into account multiple factors, including Hong Kong's market pay and economic conditions, the staff turnover rate and financial position of the Authority, and the work performances and existing pay positions of the executives.”

Law said the two museums had grown their earnings. Admission, sponsorships and commercial revenue each make up about a third of the museums' total income, she said, and their combined income in 2025-26 rose more than 20% from the year before.

Those figures cover the museums. The West Kowloon Cultural District Authority, which runs them and the wider district, has recorded an operating deficit for six consecutive years, Hong Kong Free Press reported. It operates under a government cap on the share of its spending that can go to staff, an authority paper to its advisory panel shows.

The authority runs M+ and the Hong Kong Palace Museum in a harbor-front district designed to help finance its own operations. In 2008, Hong Kong's legislature gave it HK$21.6 billion, about US$2.7 billion, to build and operate the district, with no yearly government funding after that.

But the authority lost HK$769 million last fiscal year. In February, it signed a HK$3 billion bank loan and set up a program to borrow up to US$1 billion more by selling bonds. The debt must be repaid with interest, and the program marks the authority's first borrowing on financial markets.

Rather than providing direct funding, the government allowed the authority to sell apartments built on its land and keep the proceeds, authority records show.

"The relaxation of the EFA will provide a more stable source of income and enhance financial flexibility for WKCDA," the authority said at the time.

"It also introduces a more diversified development model and optimizes the use of precious land resources to unleash the development potential of the commercial portion in the district without increasing the financial burden on the government."

The permission came with conditions, including a limit on the authority's losses over any three-year period and a cap on the percentage of staff cost to total annual operating expenditure. This sets a ceiling on how much of the district's spending can go to paying its people, an authority paper to its advisory panel shows.

Neither museum has announced layoffs and a review of the authority's press releases, its reports to lawmakers and its advisory-panel papers turned up none.

The wider Hong Kong government has ordered departments to cut spending by a cumulative 7% over four years and trimmed subsidies to public bodies by about 2% this year, the South China Morning Post reported in March.

Bernard Chan, who became the district's chairman in October, said the loan showed the lender was "confident about our future ability to make money," he told the South China Morning Post.

West Kowloon is the most exposed case, but each art capital is feeling the strain in its own way.

Singapore has some of the world's largest sovereign wealth funds and started laying government workers off anyway.

The Government Technology Agency, a state agency, said Wednesday it laid off 93 officers in the first phase of a restructuring expected to cut 7% to 9% of its roughly 3,900 staff over two years, CNA reported.

Chairman Chng Kai Fong wrote to staff that the agency is "changing shape, not shrinking" and that "this is not an A.I.-driven downsizing exercise," according to CNA. Mothership reported that 36 of the 93 are expected to be laid off immediately.

GovTech is Singapore's technology agency. Nothing indicates its layoffs were connected to the city's museums or cultural sector. Still, CNA reported that Singapore's civil service had not publicly disclosed comparable layoffs since 20 officers left between 2006 and 2010.

And while Singapore's national museums, which operate under a similar government board, have not announced layoffs, its flagship institution has asked the public for money.

The National Museum of Singapore, closed in phases for renovation, ran a "Capital Campaign for Revamp" that solicited public donations through an online fundraiser. It raised just S$95 toward a S$10,000 goal before the campaign ended.

And the culture ministry has widened its heritage-donor awards to recognize more kinds of giving, a policy it frames as "co-ownership" of heritage, ministry records show.

The issues facing Gulf states are rooted in governance and developmental issues. They are still spending — Abu Dhabi last year opened the Zayed National Museum and the Natural History Museum within weeks of each other — but the spending does not always arrive on schedule, and it is built and run by imported workers.

The Guggenheim Abu Dhabi, announced in 2006 with an original opening set for 2013, has slipped past target dates in 2017 and 2022. Its project director said in February the museum would open at the end of 2026.

The delays trace not only to the 2008 recession and the pandemic but to disputes over the working conditions of the migrant laborers hired to build it, Artforum reported. And every museum director on Abu Dhabi's Saadiyat Island is a foreigner.

The emirate's Department of Culture and Tourism did not answer when Artnet News asked whether Emiratis were meant to eventually lead them. France will earn about US$1.3 billion over 30 years for the use of the Louvre's name and expertise, Artnet reported.

"You can't just establish a new cultural ecosystem in a place that doesn't yet have the experience in sustaining it," Rose Lejeune, who runs academic and community programs at a Qatar Museums art space in Doha, told Artnet.

The Saudi artist Ahmed Mater warned in the same report that the consultants building the region's museums are "benchmark-driven businesses" focused on visitor numbers and blockbuster shows. "Consultants are shaping our culture and deciding what it should look like," Mater said.

Qatar debuted an Art Basel edition that drew more than 17,000 visitors from February 3 through 7, three weeks before the United States and Israel launched strikes on Iran, drawing Iranian retaliation across the Gulf.

After the war broke out on February 28, Qatar Museums postponed the Design Doha design biennial from April to November, citing "the evolving situation in the region" in its announcement.

In the United Arab Emirates, Art Dubai postponed its 20th-anniversary edition from mid-April to mid-May and reworked it into what organizers called a "cultural gathering," Urgent Matter previously reported. About 75 of the galleries slated to exhibit dropped out.

World Art Dubai, one of the region's largest accessible art fairs, moved from April to November. The war caused hotel occupancy and air traffic to the UAE to plummet in mid-March, but Abu Dhabi's culture and tourism chairman, Mohamed Khalifa Al Mubarak, said in May that Abu Dhabi was "doubling down on our tourism ecosystem," announcing a US$1.7 billion Sphere entertainment venue.

It remains unclear how war, economic pressures and government decisions will continue to shape cultural megaprojects across Asia.

This article was written after a research lead from fellow arts journalist Reena Devi and her publication Art Industry Insights with Reena Devi.

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