January 2009

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What visitors may not realise is the role played by this pioneering collection, which Sir David began to put together in 1990. The China Club offered a high-profile exhibition space at a time when there were very few galleries in Hong Kong or on the mainland – and certainly no auction-houses – interested in showing new-wave Chinese contemporary art. Moreover, Sir David’s passion for this art had ramifications far beyond Hong Kong. Working in association with the curator and gallerist Tsong-zung Chang, he has played a major part in introducing it to an international audience and promoting it through a series of touring exhibitions, biennials and triennials.

We meet not at the China Club but in his apartment off the Old Peak Road. Since the ban on smoking in offices was introduced in Hong Kong, it is the place this inveterate cigar-smoker prefers to work. Here, and perhaps only appropriately for a Hong Kong Chinese educated at both school and university level in the UK and now married to an English wife, Lucy, Western – and predominantly British – modern and contemporary painting joins Asian contemporary. After lunch in a dining room lined with Keith Tysons, presided over by Roman busts of philosophers (Sir David had a brief spell teaching philosophy at Beijing University) and with works of art stacked against every wall, he moves off, signature Punch double Corona in hand, to the Steinway to dash off a Messiaen impromptu and a bit of Bach (W.F.).

Behind him, Julian Schnabel’s Fox Farm – inscribed ‘There is no place more horrible than a fox farm during pelting season’ – shares a wall with the Taiwanese Cheng Tsai-tung’s painting of his mother with a cat (Fig. 1). Opposite, Picasso hangs above David Piper and next to one of Park Min. Joon’s monumental, Korean-inhabited renaissance-style mythologies. Across the room, Augustus John is flanked by Stephen Conroy and Jack Vettriano, and in the hall paintings by the Birley clan – Sir Oswald and granddaughter India Jane – keep company with Howard Morgan. Sir David even had a shelf built in his bathroom so that he could look at art while in the shower. ‘Collecting art has become an obsession,’ he admits, ‘and an obsession I tend to be rather reckless about.’