Qiao Space was founded in 2015 by Qiao Zhibing, who has appeared on the annual ARTnews Top 200 Collectors list each year since 2013. Qiao is also the founder of Tank Shanghai, a private museum that has welcomed international dignitaries and art world luminaries when they have visited Shanghai and the extended West Bund area.  

For the past decade, the West Bund has been known for its groundbreaking private museums, art galleries, and artists’ studios. ShanghArt, one of China’s earliest galleries for contemporary art, has been closed, as have Don Gallery, Aike Gallery, Part Group, and artist Ding Yi’s studio.

For now, Tank Shanghai is safe, since it is on the other side of the road (near the Huangpu River) and has a relatively long-term agreement with government-managed enterprises. That institution, along with two other private museums, the Long Museum and the Start Museum, as well as the West Bund Museum, form a “cultural corridor at a relatively minimal level,” according to industry insiders.

Qiao Space was known for showcasing works by contemporary artists such as Zeng Fanzhi, Zhang Xiaogang, and Zhang Enli. Unlike some of the other resident galleries, it did not hold a closing event. However, artists and arts enthusiasts visited the site during its closure and demolition, documenting its ending with photographs and videos.

Speaking to ARTnews via phone from Shanghai, Qiao said, “This happened rather suddenly. We were just informed in March that the whole area needed to be shut down so we only had three months to process this development.”

Given the suddenness of the decision, the Chinese entrepreneur and night club owner is still considering whether he wants to reopen Qiao Space in a new physical space. Currently, Tank Shanghai has “a lot of space” to hold exhibitions, he said, and Qiao Space’s next exhibition will be held there.

Shanghai- and Beijing-based independent curator Evonne Jiawei Yuan noted, “It’s indeed a pity to see this demolition of at least five art institutions in one block at West Bund, including two collectors’ spaces and three commercial galleries, which were all of the pioneering generation boosting the development of this art zone a decade ago along with some leading architects’ offices and private museums.”

Last year saw the Yuz Museum, previously a key attraction in the West Bund, relocate an hour away from downtown Shanghai, as well as the permanent closure of the Shanghai Center of Photography. The Art Tower was sold to tech titan Alibaba, which is set to use the premises as part of its Shanghai headquarters.

In interviews with ARTnews, industry insiders said that, during the past decade, the West Bund area has faced significant changes, with the government pushing out policies such as rental discounts to attract galleries, museums, and artists. However, in recent years, this policy has shifted, and more efforts have been made to cultivate the area as a zone of technology and finance, with a special focus on AI and big data.

“The local government enterprises changed their strategy and withdraw the preferential policy of letting out spaces on the art industry at low rates due to the downcycle of the real estate market,” Yuan said. “Actually, all the spaces got notices a few years ago that they would have been removed one day and it finally happened this year.”

Mathieu Borysevicz, founder of BANK Gallery, said, “Artists and art spaces have been the catalyst for gentrification worldwide and Shanghai has been no exception. In fact, the history of contemporary arts in Shanghai has been plagued with nomadism from the outset. Gallery centers and studio enclaves seem to relocate every five years or so. China’s maxim of certain uncertainty rules supreme.”

Nonetheless, Qiao remains optimistic, currently considering how to embrace the changes of the local and global art scene while creating and supporting relevant and timely contemporary art.

“This indicates the general environment is changing—we just need to get used to it,” he said. “You cannot change the environment, you need to adjust yourself to the environment. I believe in the creation and energy of art.”

Enrique Ježik, In Hemmed-in Ground, 2018, steel structure with recycled cardboard, 30¼ inches x 37 feet, 8¾ inches x 37 feet, 8¾ inches.

JIANG WENYI/COURTESY THE ARTIST AND HILARIO GALGUERA GALLERY, MEXICO CITY/COMMISSIONED BY THE 12TH SHANGHAI BIENNALE

In the cavernous entry hall of Shanghai’s Power Station of Art, visitors encountered what appeared to be waist-high piles of discarded cardboard. Only after ascending to a second-floor balcony and viewing it from above did they realize that Argentinian artist Enrique Ježik’s mammoth installation spelled out, in Chinese characters, the phrase “one step forward, two steps back; two steps forward, one step back.” The message formed an apt introduction to the 12th edition of the Shanghai Biennale, which takes its title, “Proregress,” from a 1931 poem by American modernist e. e. cummings. Here, the word referred to the world’s current social and political landscape, with numerous countries sliding backward in a reaction against progressive movements.

Ježik, who lives and works in Mexico City, was a hometown pick by the organizer of “Proregress,” Cuauhtémoc Medina, who is chief curator of that city’s Museo Universitario de Arte Contemporanea—and he wasn’t the only such artist. Medina, who, along with curators María Belén Sáez de Ibarra from Colombia, Yukie Kamiya from Japan, and Wang Weiwei from China, selected 67 artists and collectives from 26 countries, brought with him the largest grouping of art from Latin America ever to be seen in China. It makes sense for “Proregress”: several Latin American countries are struggling with failing economies, and Brazil has just elected a president with authoritarian tendencies.

A Latin American artist was responsible for one of the most visible artworks in the biennial, and one of the most political: Streaming down the Power Station’s five-story atrium was Chilean artist Voluspa Jarpa’s Monumenta (2018), a giant mobile made out of declassified documents (printed as transparencies on plexiglass) detailing U.S. intelligence agencies’ incursions into Latin America.

Off the atrium on the first floor, one entered a warren of video installations where artists continued the theme of lives upended and dreams curtailed by Western notions of progress. Christoph Draeger and Heidrun Holzfeind, respectively Swiss and Austrian, teamed up to create The Auroville Project, a fascinating look at a utopian community in Southeast India founded in 1968 and still operating today. Photographs and artifacts surrounded a geodesic dome housing videos capturing the society’s universalist outlook and educational programs. Peruvian artist Claudia Martínez Garay contributed nuqa kausa kusaq qhepaykitapas/i will outlive you (2017), a haunting video filmed in adobe dwellings accompanied by idiosyncratic clay figures and shapes, displayed as they might be in an ethnographic museum.

Claudia Martínez Garay, … imaywanpas quidakuwakmi … / … but you can stay with my stuff … (detail), 2017, ceramic and paintings, dimensions variable.

JIANG WENYI/COURTESY GRIMM GALLERY, AMSTERDAM

Upstairs, installations veered from one political crisis to the next, as biennials tend to do these days; the standout works among them managed to join aesthetic innovations to thoughtful commentary. For example, In Search of Vanished Blood (2012), by master Indian artist Nalini Malani, was a complete video environment that depicted dualities (nature vs. war, female vs. male) in vivid hand-drawn animations and footage of projected text streaming over women’s bodies. In their three-channel video, The Great Silence (2014), the team of Jennifer Allora & Guillermo Calzadilla from Puerto Rico humorously examined the intentions of the Arecibo Observatory in Esperanza, Puerto Rico, to make contact with extraterrestials from the viewpoint of a talking parrot who lives in the surrounding Rio Abajo forest. Japanese artist Chiba Masaya charmed his way into the mix with his paintings of the interior of his studio, filled with papier-mâché objects he creates from ephemera and debris he gathers daily in the streets of Yokohama. Much more politically charged and graphically arresting were Philippines artist Kiri Dalena’s “portraits” of political activists in their homes, their faces covered with white plaster masks to protect their anonymity.

But the artist who best captured the theme of “Proregress” was Michael Rakowitz, an artist of Iraqi descent living in Chicago, with his installation, The Invisible Enemy Should Not Exist. (Recovered, Missing, Stolen Series), 2007 to the present. Displayed in numerous glass vitrines were Rakowitz’s miniature papier-mâché re-creations of antiquities looted from the National Museum of Iraq in Baghdad in the aftermath of the 2003 U.S. invasion. On the surrounding walls were his hyperrealistic cartoons narrating the story of the many players involved in the looting, from the head of the museum to U.S. military leaders; it was a prime example of American aspirations to spark progress running counter to the preservation of culture.

A very literal, Sisyphean visualization of “Proregress” was Francis Alÿs’s Rehearsal I (1999–2004), a video of a red VW Beetle struggling to ascend a sandy hill, only to keep sliding back down. The work, which has been exhibited many times, can seem like a facile metaphor for the ambivalent relationship of third world countries to linear notions of modernism, but in the context of this biennial, it found new relevance.

Jiu Society, A Community Estate Project, 2018, mixed-media installation, dimensions variable.

JIANG WENYI/COURTESY VANGUARD GALLERY, SHANGHAI

The relevance of “Proregress” to China, however, with its enviable GDP, seemed a bit of a stretch, especially in Shanghai. All around the city, there seemed to be nothing but progress, particularly in the art scene, which has witnessed an unprecedented growth of private museums and art fairs. Around the time the biennial opened, Shanghai unveiled two art fairs: Art 021 and West Bund Art Fair. A stellar Louise Bourgeois show opened at the Long Museum, a Francis Alÿs exhibition opened at the Rockbund Art Museum, Maurizio Cattelan collaborated with Gucci at the Yuz Museum, and Thomas Hirschhorn unveiled a huge installation at the Ming Art Museum. To cap things off, Shanghai collector Qiao Zhibing inaugurated Tank Shanghai, a museum complex installed in former oil tanks on the banks of the Huangpu River, where two artists in the biennial staged off-site events.

Then again, an ominous shadow loomed in the person of President Xi Jinping, who was in town for the China International Import Expo. In the past two years, President Xi has unleashed a slate of repressive measures, including the imprisonment of nearly a million Uyghur citizens in Xinjiang province and the arrest of dozens of internet activists and human rights lawyers. Rumors abounded in Shanghai that it might have been due to Xi’s presence there that the artist selections at the biennial were not finalized until two days before the opening. With those rumors came attendant buzz of censorship. Whereas artists’ contributions from other regions freely addressed issues such as post-colonialism, immigration, climate change, and politics, Chinese artists came across as reticent on current events.

Nevertheless, the Biennale remains a great place to discover emerging Chinese artists. This time around, several were given the run of the Power Station’s third floor. Jiu Society, a collaborative team of three Shenzhen artists—Fang Di, Ji Hao, and Jin Haofan—turned their gallery into a model home rental display with A Community Estate Project (2018), a satire of China’s real estate boom. Complete with a duo of sales agents, the installation included a miniature model of the real estate development and a faux apartment with gilded furniture and a widescreen TV. Close by, another bedroom setup featured a video of an imaginary game show, testing contestants on their knowledge of the development of Shanghai’s art scene. Titled Not As Trivial As You Think (2018), it was the work of the duo C+G, Hong Kong artists Clara Cheung and Cheng Yee Man. Another Hong Kong artist, Samson Young, was responsible for the remarkable Muted Situation #22: Muted Tchaikovsky’s 5th (2018), a single-channel video installation with 12-channel sound of an orchestra playing the classical composition, but all music was muted, allowing for only the sounds of violin and strings being stroked and drums being struck.

Huang Jing Yuan created a full environment with her work, The Right to Write (2016–18). In this homage to storytelling, the artist paired Chinese street signage, monumental realist paintings, a floor made of layers of bubble wrap, and an animation depicting different modes of narrative production, from a naive fairytale to a history of Thomas Edison’s light bulb. In the final space of this multipart wooden structure, Huang provided visitors a writing desk and paper to contribute their own stories.

Lu Yang, Material World Knight, 2018, video installation, dimensions variable.

JIANG WENYI

Absorbing as they were, none of these works seemed particularly pointed or critical of any aspect of Chinese life, though The Right to Write might be interpreted as a call to self-empowerment. Their presence, while welcome additions to a show that must feature at least a few Chinese artists, watered down the overall theme. In stark contrast, Lu Yang’s multimedia installation Material World Knight (2018) was worth the show’s price of admission.

Material World Knight wove together references to the film Mars Attacks, Japanese anime, and the latest information on biotechnology. Mural-size monitors broadcasted animations about superheroes and exoskeleton robotics; arcade machines playing fully operational video games lined the walls. In the center of the floor were three sprawling architectural models of cities in states of destruction, post-apocalyptic visions with an alien spacecraft landing in the middle of one. LED signs making announcements in Chinese hung near the ceiling, and Japanese pop music was piped in. It all added up to a mesmerizing bombardment of the senses, a frenetic sci-fi vision of the future.

Medina’s Shanghai Biennale could have used more of Lu Yang’s infectious energy. Its maze of dark screening rooms was too often unrelentingly somber. But maybe that’s the point: seen against the background of Shanghai’s ebullient mood, “Proregress” threw problematic world affairs into high relief, and made the ebullience feel like fantasy.

A version of this story originally appeared in the Spring 2019 issue of ARTnews on page 106 under the title “12th Shanghai Biennale.”

Jack Whitten, The Eighth Furrow, 1973, in the collection of Pamela J. Joyner and Alfred J. Giuffrida.

COURTESY ALEXANDER GRAY ASSOCIATES, NEW YORK

This past summer, we asked everyone on the ARTnews “Top 200 Collectors” list to share the names of the people who inspired them to begin collecting. Their answers ranged from major museum directors to some of art history’s greatest patrons.

Agnes Gund.

©2013 TIMOTHY GREENFIELD-SANDERS

Few made as great of an impression on the “Top 200” collectors as Agnes Gund, president emerita of the Museum of Modern Art and a fixture of ARTnews’s list. Earlier this year, Gund sold a $165 million Roy Lichtenstein painting (to another “Top 200” collector, Steven A. Cohen) to help start the Art for Justice Fund, which will put money toward reducing mass incarceration in America. “Not only a friend to artists and the institutions presenting them, Aggie has also dedicated herself to arts education, and [has] just now used her collection and position to underscore the problems of mass incarceration,” Estrellita and Daniel Brodsky told ARTnews. JK Brown and Eric Diefenbach likewise cite Gund as an inspiration for their collection.

Gund isn’t the only “Top 200 Collector” to serve as inspiration. Susan and Leonard Feinstein said they continue to look to the collections of the Eisenberg Family, although that’s hardly surprising, considering that Leonard Feinstein and Warren Eisenberg cofounded Bed Bath & Beyond together. And Qiao Zhibing, the founder of the Tank Shanghai museum, said he collects with Karen and Christian Boros and the Rubell Family’s habits in mind, as well as those of the late Swiss collector and art dealer Ernst Beyeler, who cofounded Art Basel in 1970 and whose museum, the Fondation Beyeler, continues to produce some of Europe’s most thoughtful exhibitions.

Peggy Guggenheim arranging Alexander Calder’s Arc of Petals (1941), Greek Pavilion, Venice Biennale, 1948.

©SOLOMON R. GUGGENHEIM FOUNDATION, NEW YORK, ALL RIGHTS RESERVED/ ARCHIVIO CAMERAPHOTO EPOCHE, GIFT, CASSA DI RISPARMIO DI VENEZIA, 2005

Some collectors look to historical patrons for inspiration. For Patrizia Sandretto Re Rebaudengo, Peggy Guggenheim, the New York heiress who built an impressive collection of modern art that now resides in Venice, served as a model to follow. Guggenheim was involved in the avant-garde circles of Paris during the 1930s, and was at one time married to Max Ernst. Re Rebaudengo, who started a foundation to support contemporary artists and has a private museum in Turin and another foundation to come in Madrid, many of whom she collects, called Guggenheim “a mythical figure . . . for her passion, her insight, her direct connection to artists.”

Andrea and José Olympio Pereira pointed to their friend Gilberto Chateaubriand, whom they described as “the greatest collector Brazil has ever had” and who was listed on the ARTnews “Top 200 Collectors” between 1992 and 2007. Diane and Bruce Halle cited Marieluise Hessel, the founder of CCS Bard museum, whose collection of art made since 1960 forms the foundation of the museum’s permanent collection. Julia Stoschek named the German collector and arts writer Harald Falckenberg as a source of inspiration.

Often, collecting—or, at the very least, art appreciation—runs in the family. Florence and Daniel Guerlain told ARTnews that Jacques Guerlain, the French perfumer whose wealth they inherited, once owned an impressive collection of “the artists of his time,” the Impressionists. They added, “We choose to do the same by collecting the artists of our time.” Nadia Samdani wrote of her father who collected modern Bangladeshi art. “I have lived surrounded by art all my life and grew interest from my childhood,” she said.

Ciprian Muresan, All images from a Book on Dora Maurer, 2015, in the collection of Florence and Daniel Guerlain.

ANDRÉ MORIN/COURTESY DAVID NOLAN GALLERY, NEW YORK

Dimitris Daskalopoulos told of his “two enlightened uncles,” who took him on a tour of Europe, where he had his “very first art epiphany” when he was 12 years old. At the Alte Pinakothek in Munich, Germany, Daskalopoulous was mesmerized by paintings by Peter Paul Rubens, staring at his masterpieces for two hours. Thomas Olbricht mentioned his great-uncle Karl Ströher, who accrued a renowned collection of Pop and Minimalist art, though he added, “But I think I was born a collector. I started collecting stamps at the age of five and still do now.” Bob Rennie often thinks of his mother when he collects. He recalls her making decisions such as “which Robert Wood print from Sears she would acquire and the big decision between wood frame or gold.”

Raymond J. McGuire, left, artist Lynette Yiadom-Boakye, and Thelma Golden.

RAY A. LLANOS/COURTESY THE STUDIO MUSEUM IN HARLEM

But who better to point a collector in the right direction than a curator? Pamela J. Joyner said that when she was at Harvard Business School getting her M.B.A., Lowery Stokes Sims, the first black curator at the Metropolitan Museum of Art, kicked off her interest in collecting. She “advised me to buy art once my career was established,” Joyner said. “That started me on a hobby that quickly morphed into a mission: to help reintroduce the long line of African-American painters who have produced great work while being overlooked by the art establishment. . . . Years later, when I had the resources, I called Lowery and asked her how to do it.” Sims later became president at the Studio Museum in Harlem, where Thelma Golden is currently director and chief curator. The Studio Museum’s board chairman, Raymond J. McGuire, and his wife, Crystal McCrary, said that it’s Golden who has continued to inspire their collection.

Barbara and Aaron Levine said San Francisco Museum of Modern Art director Neal Benezra has guided them, and Norah and Norman Stone described John Caldwell, a curator at SFMOMA who died in 1993, as “one of our first and most important inspirations.” Meanwhile, on the European front, Nicholas Serota, the former director of Tate in London, has influenced Londoner Anita Zabludowicz.

A Sol LeWitt drawing in the home of Michael Ovitz.

WILSON CHANG/COURTESY OVITZ COLLECTION

Some collectors cited places and things, rather than people, as inspirations. “[It’s] not a person,” Donald B. Marron said, “but a visit to the Cubist room at the Museum of Modern Art in New York” that kicked off his interest in collecting. Michael Ovitz likewise credited museum-going. “I never went to a museum until I was 18 years old,” he said. After taking an art class at UCLA, he knew he had to change that. “When I was 18, I made my first trip to New York City and I went to the Museum of Modern Art, and I went there three times in two days. I had never seen anything like it in my life.”

Iris and Matthew Strauss trace their collecting habits back to a single work they saw at the Museum of Contemporary Art San Diego in California: Jennifer Bartlett’s Rhapsody (1975–76), a work they said contains “every kind of iconography the mind can imagine.” “This,” the Strausses said, “was the beginning of [a] desire to collect.”

KATHERINE MCMAHON

And it is indeed the object itself that is at the heart of collecting, which is the subject of this issue of ARTnews. The centerpiece, of course, is the 27th edition of our Top 200 Collectors list, and every article in it relates to collecting in some way or another. Barbara Pollack, for example, talked to Qiao Zhibing, a Chinese collector on our list about a museum that he’s creating out of disused oil tanks. And artist Brian Belott, interviewed in these pages, tells Bill Powers about his stash of old answering-machine tapes. Then there are the art dealers, in particular, those of the past, for whom we now feel a great deal of nostalgia, as ARTnews co-executive editor Andrew Russeth argues. They helped assemble the world’s great collections.

Eventually, some collections end up in the public trust: ARTnews deputy editor M. H. Miller spent a week in Detroit, a city that, during bankruptcy proceedings three years ago, flirted with the idea of putting pieces from the world-class holdings of its Detroit Institute of Arts up for sale to pay the city’s creditors. The collector’s impulse to preserve and protect finds an echo in Zoë Lescaze’s feature on the arduous efforts of Donald Judd’s children to maintain their father’s properties in New York and Texas. And finally, ARTnews senior staff writer Nate Freeman gained access to the New Guard at Sotheby’s, where many a collector has acquired many an artwork, and discussed with them how the business is changing.

We collect objects, but we also affix aspirations to them. In that vein, a comment that kept resonating for me as this issue went to press was that of artist Ursula von Rydingsvard, on her collection of wooden pieces ranging from African masks to old shovels, combs, and farm tools—things that she says “play a major role in keeping my spirits high and in continuing my belief in humanity.”

 
 
 
 
 
 
SARAH DOUGLAS, EDITOR-IN-CHIEF
 

Tank Shanghai, Qiao Zhibing’s art museum and recreational facility on the shores of the Huangpu River.

COURTESY QIAO ZHIBING

Shanghai Night is the brainchild of Chinese collector Qiao Zhibing, who, in just ten years, has made a name for himself as one of the leading buyers of international contemporary art in China. Now, poised to move beyond the nightclub as exhibition venue, the entrepreneur-collector is opening Tank Shanghai, a combination of art museum and recreation facility built from five empty oil tanks standing on the shores of the Huangpu River. Scheduled to debut in December, the complex, designed by Beijing-based OPEN Architecture, measures some 640,000 square feet, with about 100,000 square feet of exhibition space. It will be the new highlight of the art-rich West Bund Cultural Corridor, a government initiative that already includes the Long Museum and the Yuz Museum; Oriental Dreamworks will also soon open its doors there. Qiao estimates the budget for the project at 100 million RMB, or $15 million, most of it culled from his own resources.

“I started out simply wanting to decorate my clubs, but soon I wanted to increase the quality,” says Qiao, speaking with the assistance of a translator while enjoying tea at an upscale Beijing hotel. Casually but fashionably dressed, the 50-year-old collector, accompanied by his ever-present girlfriend, Tsai Lihsin, speaks openly of his ambitions at the beginning of his enterprise. “So many people visited the clubs, and the collection was a way of showing off my taste. It’s like having a dress code to maintain a high quality as part of the atmosphere.”

Architectural rendering of the future Tank Shanghai. (Click to enlarge.)

COURTESY QIAO ZHIBING

At the time, it was still rare for a Chinese collector to acquire works from galleries rather than auction houses and rarer still for one to frequent international art fairs. Qiao made his first purchase of a work by an international artist in 2009, when he bought an Antony Gormley sculpture from Continua Gallery in Beijing. “I was looking for sculptures with an immediate emotional impact,” he recalled. Soon after, he began approaching Western art dealers, who were sometimes less than accommodating with this unknown entrepreneur from China. “They would ask questions like, ‘Can you name a few contemporary artists?’ just to see if I knew what I was doing,” Qiao said. Now those same dealers welcome him with open arms and invite him to their homes. Qiao told me that on a recent trip, he went to dinner at David Zwirner’s home, and the dealer’s wife presented him with a bottle of fine Chinese rice wine. “She ran around New York for a day and found the last bottle, just to give it to me,” he said.

When asked how he won over hard-nosed New York dealers, Qiao explained, “My passion touched them. This is also about your taste. If you pick the good-quality works, this would be very helpful. But it is also about long-term persistence. If you go there every year and buy frequently, they will know you are serious.”

As Zwirner himself put it, “I have had many good times together with Qiao Zhibing and Lihsin over the past year, from visits to Shanghai and Hong Kong, as well as hosting them in New York and at Art Basel. I love their youthful energy and entrepreneurial spirit, and I admire their enthusiasm and commitment to collecting.”

The interior of Qiao’s Shanghai Night club.

COURTESY QIAO ZHIBING

“If someone said, ‘I’m going to put my collection in a night club in New York,’ everyone would be aghast,” Kelly said. “But somehow in China, the mere fact that someone like Qiao Zhibing is collecting in such a sophisticated way is an important statement, and the fact that he is exposing it to such a plural audience is actually quite a wonderful thing.”

Qiao Zhibing, left, helping Damien Hirst with a spin painting.

COURTESY QIAO ZHIBING

He is certain that Tank Shanghai will bring his collection to a whole new level. “Up to now,” he said, “I’ve thought of my purchases as a matter of individual taste, but today I am thinking for an institution.” The tank complex, formerly an airport facility, will have five oil tanks turned into multilevel exhibition spaces as well as parkland, restaurants, and bars, a marina by the river, and a heliport. He is already inviting artists to visit the site and propose commissioned projects. Olafur Eliasson, Danh Vo, Theaster Gates, Martin Creed, Anish Kapoor, and Abramović have come to look things over. “First of all, we respect the artists’ own choices,” said Tsai, who is a partner on the project. “We really wouldn’t intervene with their creation except if it is beyond our limits.” One such project—an installation proposed by Kapoor conjoining the roofs of two tanks—proved impractical.

“Contemporary art has opened my mind in ways that have influenced every aspect of my life,” said Qiao. “Many of my friends collect wine or cars, but I have sacrificed all recreational activities for contemporary art.” And it looks as if he will be able to pass his devotion on to the next generation, too. His daughter, who is 20 and studying at the School of the Art Institute of Chicago, often voices her opinion on his selections. By the time she graduates, Tank Shanghai will have opened, and perhaps, as often happens in China, the founder’s child will become the museum’s first curator or director.

Barbara Pollack is a contributing editor of ARTnews.

A version of this story originally appeared in the Fall 2016 issue of ARTnews on page 128 under the title “From Palace to Tank.”

Why open a museum, anyway?

Désiré Feuerle.

“Growing up in Indonesia, I have always been aware of the limited opportunities to engage with and learn about the arts in this country. There are countless talented artists here in Indonesia who deserve a platform to share their work with the world.”
–Haryanto Adikoesoemo

“We can be more nimble than a traditional museum and create a dialogue between the four categories we collect.”
–J. Tomilson Hill

“We have commissioned so many artworks that are so large and so big and so important in the world. We’ll bring them to Budidesa for permanent display.”
–Budi Tek

“We need to collect foreign art so that our museums can be on par with foreign peers.”
–Wang Wei [as told to the Financial Times]

NEW MUSEUMS TO WATCH: Marciano Art Foundation (Maurice & Paul Marciano, Los Angeles, early 2017) • Pinault Collection (François Pinault, Paris, 2018) • Art Jameel Center (Jameel Family, Dubai, 2018) • JNBY Art Center (Li Lin, Guangzhou, Fall 2018) • GES2 (Leonid Mikhelson, Moscow, 2018)

FUN FACTS:

Before it was home to a museum, the new branch of Crystal Bridges was a cheese-making facility owned by Kraft Foods. Located a couple miles from the main Crystal Bridges building, it will retain it’s industrial look.

4,000: Number of water lilies, irises, and rushes on Glenstone’s verdant property in Potomac, Maryland.

After deciding that she didn’t want a bunker or a factory for her Berlin museum, Julia Stoschek settled on a World War II–era Czech cultural center. “The space in Berlin marks a very important and very interesting chapter of East German history,” she said.

Public and private are never completely separate, and this is especially the case with Museum Voorlinden, which hired Wim Pijbes as its director. Pijbes had been a general director for eight years at one of the world’s most important institutions—the Rijksmuseum.

A version of this story originally appeared in the Fall 2016 issue of ARTnews on page 84 under the title “Private Practices.”

Nicole Eisenman, Morning Studio, 2016, in the collection of Susan and Michael Hort.

©NICOLE EISENMAN/COURTESY THE ARTIST AND ANTON KERN

Four years ago, J. Tomilson Hill, vice chairman of the private equity firm the Blackstone Group, got a phone call from L.A.-based artist Mark Grotjahn, whose work Hill has collected in depth. Grotjahn was coming to New York and intended to visit the exhibition “Matisse: In Search of True Painting” at the Metropolitan Museum of Art. Hill, a Met trustee, not only got Grotjahn admitted on a Monday—the museum was closed on Mondays at the time—he also got the show’s curator, Rebecca Rabinow, to accompany him through the galleries. Hill couldn’t resist tagging along. He wanted to experience Grotjahn’s reaction to Matisse. “I strongly believe,” Hill told ARTnews in an interview this past summer, “that if you look at an artwork being made today and you juxtapose it with a work from 200 or 500 years ago, the one today, if it’s good, can help you see the older one in a different way.”

Etel Adnan, Champs de Petrol, 2013, in the collection of Sultan Sooud Al Qassemi.

COURTESY BARJEEL ART FOUNDATION, SHARJAH

Hill should know. In the course of their collecting, he and his wife, Janine, have long been juxtaposing contemporary art with older art, and they will soon be sharing such displays with the public at their private museum. The Hill Art Foundation, which will be admission-free, opens next fall in a Peter Marino–designed building in New York’s Chelsea art district. The building’s windows looking out onto the High Line, the elevated park that runs through Chelsea, will provide millions of passersby a glimpse into a world where Christopher Wool might meet Duccio, where Lucio Fontana might meet Giambologna, where Sarah Crowner might meet Peter Paul Rubens.

Hill is the kind of collector who has long been a fixture of ARTnews’s annual “World’s Top 200 Collectors” list: passionate, committed, serious, voracious. The kind of collector who sticks around even when the market cools off. And the market has indeed cooled off. Last June, when ARTnews went to press on the 2015 edition of our “Top 200 Collectors” issue, it was on the heels of Christie’s New York having auctioned Picasso’s 1955 painting Les Femmes d’Alger for a record $179 million. This time around the buoyancy has subsided: The May auctions in New York took in a total of around $1 billion, less than half of last year’s haul. Volume was down. Sales for the first half of 2016 at both Christie’s and Sotheby’s were down about a third from the same period a year ago.

The speculators in work by younger artists have vanished–very likely one reason that contemporary sales at Christie’s were down 45 percent in the first half of 2016, compared to the same period in 2015—and the mind-boggling price records are fewer and further between.

The word on everyone’s lips at Art Basel in June was “uncertainty”: What will happen with Brexit; with the unprecedentedly weird, high-stakes U.S. election; and with global stability in the face of terrorism? (The fair upped its security at the door.) Some market observers were saying that collectors had recently gotten “cautious,” and that the air was thinner than usual for artworks priced in excess of $10 million. But one thing was for sure: the stalwarts—those collectors on our list—were there, their checkbooks at the ready and their keen eyes out for quality. Among those on hand were the Horts, the Rubells, Martin Margulies, Patrizia Sandretto Re Rebaudengo, Tony Salamé, and Qiao Zhibing, to name just a few.

Ryan Trecartin, CENTER JENNY (still), 2013, in the collection of Anita and Poju Zabludowicz.

©RYAN TRECARTIN/COURTESY REGEN PROJECTS, LOS ANGELES, AND ANDREA ROSEN GALLERY, NEW YORK

All of which is not to say the market is in a deep rut. Far from it. In May, Japanese collector Yusaku Maezawa, new to our list this year, hoovered up $98 million worth of art in just two days of auctions. And last June, Sotheby’s London set a new record for Cubism at auction when Picasso’s 1909 painting Femme Assise sold for $63.6 million. Collectors are going for top quality; the good stuff is selling.

Other records have also turned heads. In May the New York Times reported that Argentinean businessman Eduardo F. Costantini, another collector on our list, had bought Diego Rivera’s 1928 painting Baile en Tehuantepec privately through Phillips auction house for $15.7 million, setting a new record price for the artist. Asian buying is strong, and Silicon Valley is increasingly joining the collecting fray, with Pace Gallery expanding into Palo Alto, and Gagosian opening opposite the new SFMOMA.

Weak market? “It’s a savvy market,” one of the savviest market players told us in Basel, adding “the best and the smartest are the risk-takers.”

A version of this story originally appeared in the Fall 2016 issue of ARTnews on page 77.