It is 10.30am and Lars Nittve has just parked his white Mini outside an Ap Lei Chau factory building.
'You pick up a lot when visiting artists,' says the bespectacled museum boss as he approaches the studio of Kacey Wong. 'I like to listen and learn. I like to talk and communicate.'
Paying calls on local artists as they are in the process of creating has become part of Nittve's routine since the beginning of the year, when he came on board as the executive director of M+, the museum of contemporary art planned for the West Kowloon Cultural District.
The gigantic white door swings open as Nittve enters the 2,000sq ft studio, which boasts a large terrace overlooking the ocean. Inside stands Forever Absolute Emptiness, a work in progress that features a winged bicycle with speakers playing a collection of melancholy Canto hits from the 1980s. Wong explains to Nittve how it works as a conceptual time machine.
He tells the 58-year-old Swede: 'Your presence has already triggered some changes in Hong Kong's museum scene. People have been ringing me up discussing a change in direction of existing museums.'
The calls have come from staff at the city's 18 government-owned museums, which include the Museum of Art, in Tsim Sha Tsui, and the Heritage Museum, in Sha Tin. It is a measure of Nittve's reputation. He was the founding director of London's Tate Modern, which has become one of the world's most influential contemporary-art museums.
A smiling Nittve is led out to view more quirky works of art on the terrace. 'It's hard to create a museum because you don't know what will happen,' says Nittve, as he squeezes his more than six-foot-tall frame into one of Wong's sculptural huts. 'There's something I've noticed - there's a lack of trust in the audience ... [but] people are smarter than you think.'