Suhanya Raffel - Time Magazine

The director of M+ in Hong Kong, Suhanya Raffel has navigated a whole career’s worth of challenges in just five years since it opened. The museum she leads focuses on visual and digital culture, with recent exhibitions considering the internet’s influence on video art and the relationship between Picasso and four generations of Asian and Asian diasporic artists. Raffel opened the transdisciplinary institution during the COVID pandemic, in 2021, only to face growing government censorship and a funding crisis. She has defended the need for artistic independence while operating under Hong Kong's national security law, which criminalizes anything deemed critical of China's government, including art. Raffel has made strides in increasing private fundraising (M+ raised HKD130,000,000, or $16.6 million, in 2025), an ever-more-valuable skill amid shrinking public funding and mounting scrutiny in Hong Kong.

At the same time, Raffel has managed to establish the museum’s global credibility, overseeing 15 major collaboration agreements to create ongoing exchanges of resources and research beyond one-off shows or loans, including recent deals with New York City’s Museum of Modern Art and Paris’s Centre Pompidou. Under the latter deal, the institutions will team up to commission new art and present a series of exhibitions in Hong Kong starting next year.