Huge National Art Museum of China still not approved

With Hong Kong's M+ Museum due to open in 2017, it was widely believed the city would enter an intense rivalry with Beijing as a new centre for art and culture in Asia. Now, such ideas seem premature.

While Swiss architecture studio Herzog & de Meuron was picked in June to design a grand 75,000-square-metre arts museum in the West Kowloon Cultural District, it remains unclear when - if at all - Beijing will proceed with its own mega-sized art museum on the capital's northern outskirts.

It has been almost a year since French architect Jean Nouvel won the highly coveted commission to design the 130,000-square-metre National Art Museum of China (Namoc) that will be sited next to the National Stadium. However, Nouvel's conceptual design, which was inspired by an ink brushstroke, still has not been approved by China's new leadership.

An official announcement of his winning the commission was expected to follow. There is still no word of the decision. In the meantime, Nouvel's team is said to have been working with the Beijing Institute of Architecture Design to fine-tune the design.

Adding to the uncertainty is the new administration's frugality campaign that has frozen all spending on new government office buildings. The mammoth size of the planned art museum, though intended for public use, may run against the policy of the new leadership under President Xi Jinping , who pledged an end to the building of ostentatious public buildings.

The new national art museum was to be the biggest in the world when completed in 2015, to reflect China's status as a cultural superpower.