Pro-China Lawmakers in Hong Kong Find a New National-Security Target: Art

“It shouldn’t be the politicians who curate this exhibition,” said

Uli Sigg,

referring to the M+ Museum’s coming opening exhibition. “If we were not allowed to show the pieces we have on this list, that would be a very serious offense also to me personally.”

The inaugural exhibition later this year will be a test of artistic freedom in a city where China increasingly suppresses democratic political activism. Mr. Sigg’s collection, one of the largest troves of contemporary Chinese art, includes such politically sensitive works as “Study of Perspective: Tian’anmen,” a black-and-white photograph in which Chinese artist

Ai Weiwei

offers a middle-finger salute to Beijing’s Tiananmen Square. Some works Mr. Sigg donated are set to be shown at the opening exhibition, which he is co-curating.

Authorities’ broad new powers under the national security law imposed by Beijing last June include criminalizing acts deemed to provoke hatred of China’s central government.

While local officials and museum bosses have yet to address concerns over any specific works, many in the city’s arts community fear that some of Mr. Sigg’s donated art won’t ever see the light of day.

Long reliant on the finance industry, Hong Kong has worked hard to become a global arts hub. It is among the world’s biggest art-auction markets and one of the three cities world-wide to host the Art Basel fair.

At the center of the current debate is Mr. Ai’s middle-finger image, one of a series in which he offers the gesture to iconic landmarks around the world, including the White House and the Eiffel Tower.

During a media tour of the museum in March, M+ director

Suhanya Raffel

said works by Mr. Ai would be shown, according to reports from those that attended the tour.

In the Hong Kong legislature days later, pro-Beijing lawmaker

Eunice Yung

grilled Chief Executive

Carrie Lam

—the city’s top local official—on the subject, alluding to Mr. Ai’s art as insulting to China and potentially in violation of the national security law.

“How would you explain to a kid about a middle finger pointing at Tiananmen Square?” Ms. Yung said in a later interview. She urged the museum to remove any offensive art from its collection.

Ms. Lam initially responded that artistic freedom is respected in Hong Kong, though a few days later she shifted position, saying that the government would handle any cases in a serious manner if creative works are seen as breaching the law.

Exhibition curators are left in an unenviable position, as the law’s language on what constitutes a national-security violation is broad and vague, and police tend to act only after an alleged offense is committed.

M+ will comply with the laws of Hong Kong “whilst maintaining the highest level of professional integrity,” the museum said in an emailed response to questions. Asked about Ms. Raffel’s pledge to show works by Mr. Ai, the museum didn’t comment.

The West Kowloon Cultural District Authority, the governing body of the M+ Museum, said it had never planned to show Mr. Ai’s “Study of Perspective: Tian’anmen” at the opening exhibition. As of publication, the work remains on the M+ website.

The art the museum obtained from Mr. Sigg—the donated items plus 47 works it purchased—also includes politically sensitive works by other artists. One painting shows Mao Zedong examining a urinal. Another reproduces a famous photo from China’s 1989 pro-democracy protests showing two wounded students being frantically transported to a hospital on the back of a tricycle—but with two bleeding penguins in the students’ place.

Mr. Sigg began amassing an encyclopedic group of works by China’s burgeoning avant-garde nearly three decades ago, when few others were paying much attention. Now 75, he lived in China first as an executive of Swiss elevator maker Schindler Holding AG starting in 1979, and later as Swiss ambassador to China in the late ’90s. He hung works from his collection in both the embassy and his Beijing residence.

Later, Mr. Sigg decided to give away the collection—oil paintings, photographs, installations and multimedia—so that the Chinese people could see their own art. He considered museums in Shanghai and Beijing, which the artist Mr. Ai advised against.

“It’s better to just throw your artworks in the lake sitting next to you,” he told Mr. Sigg, who has a home on Switzerland’s Lake Mauensee.

Mr. Sigg spoke with top Hong Kong officials, and emerged saying he felt confident in the city’s rights to free expression, enshrined until 2047 in the Basic Law, Hong Kong’s mini-constitution. The roughly 700,000-square-foot harborfront museum is viewed by some as Asia’s answer to New York’s Museum of Modern Art.

Back then Hong Kong made sense as a destination for Mr. Sigg’s donation, Mr. Ai said in an interview, but as soon as the security law was imposed the city lost its special partly autonomous status.

“Hong Kong is no longer what it was,” he said. “China will never allow such a private collection to include so many works that it views as politically problematic.”

Mr. Sigg said he still hopes his dream will be realized.

“Someday in the future, Chinese people can see this collection fully displayed,“ he said. “It’s not about me, it’s about the long haul.”

Write to Joyu Wang at [email protected] and Yoko Kubota at [email protected]