Arts hub bosses should concentrate on what would be in the West Kowloon Cultural District rather than spend money on dreaming up a new name for it, culture groups and arts critics said.
Cultural district authority chief executive Michael Lynch hinted that the body was considering a new name to symbolise progress in the long-delayed project, and distance it from past rows.
The HK$21.6 billion project has never been far from controversy since it was first mooted in the 1990s.
Most recently, it has been at the centre of a row over a potential conflict of interest involving chief executive hopeful Leung Chun-ying, a judge in a 2001 design contest for the site. Leung has been accused of failing to declare his business connection with an unsuccessful Malaysian contestant. Leung said he was not made aware of the relationship.
It has also emerged that the winning design in that contest, by British architect Norman Foster, was rejected for technical reasons before being reinstated.
Lynch told the South China Morning Post that 'the issue of the name would be an important part [of the project's development]. There are a lot of things happening, starting to point us to the right direction. [We are] going forward, rather than arguing or justifying what we [did] the last couple of years.'
But Mathias Woo Yan-wai, head of experimental theatre company Zuni Icosahedron, said a renaming exercise would be a waste of money and fundamental questions should be settled first.