As a young student in England, George Wong had several
framed posters by Salvador Dali on his bedroom wall. Back then, his interest in
the Spanish Surrealist master only cost him £2.50. “Since then Dali has been
part of my life,” muses the 68-year-old collector, who is reputed to have
amassed the largest collection of Salvador Dali’s sculptures outside of Spain.
Most of Wong’s Dali artworks are displayed in and around
his high-end residential properties and hotels, though he has also donated some
to Nanjing and Jimei universities in China, as well as the National Museum of
China. “I feel Dali’s sculptures fit very naturally in my buildings and they’re
also surprisingly not really expensive,” he says.
What started as a hobby has now become a passion project for
the Beijing-based property developer, one he likes to share with others through
his Parkview Arts Action, the art outreach arm of the Parkview property group
that runs private museums in the group’s buildings in Beijing and Singapore.
While the trained architect started buying Chinese
classical ink landscapes and English old-school masters in the 1980s, he moved
on to Chinese contemporary art in the 1990s at a time when few collectors
showed interest. As his interest and wallet deepened, he also turned to Western
masters like Claude Monet, Henri Matisse and Pablo Picasso. Today, his massive
art collection, said to hold over 10,000 artworks, includes a range of styles
from Chinese archaic bronzes and Buddha stone carvings to artworks by Zeng
Fanzhi and Zhang Xiaogang, as well as works by Francis Bacon. If money were no
object he would have liked to have bought the Leonardo da Vinci work, ‘Salvator
Mundi,’ that sold at Christie’s in November for $450 million, “I was just short
of one zero,” he quips, but that same week he did manage to pick up two
artworks at Sotheby’s sale in New York: a small Roy Lichtenstein and an Yves
Klein.
Wong is the eldest son of the late Taiwanese property
tycoon C. S. Hwang, who founded the Chyau Fwu Group in Taiwan in the 1950s
before moving the headquarters to Hong Kong. Along with his three brothers, he
owns the Parkview Group, a conglomerate of private companies which have
interests in high end residential and hotel developments in Asia and Europe,
including the imposing Art Deco Parkview Square in Singapore where one of his
private museums is located.
Wong developed a collecting bug early on, using his
pocket money to buy stamps and coins. “As I started getting more money, I
started buying more things,” Wong said, adding that it was a visit to a London
art gallery in 1971 with his father that really got him started collecting art:
“My father had come to see us in London and we were walking in the street when
we saw an art gallery. We walked in and he bought a (painting for 17,000
guineas (17,800 pounds). At the time we had just bought a five-bedroom house
for 25,000 pounds. I was shocked. How could a painting be worth so much?”
While he still collects Chinese contemporary art, Wong
says he’s currently “more inspired” by Western contemporary artists, who have a
lot more layers in their work: “I find Chinese contemporary art is overpriced
and many artists are arrogant. They’re disconnected, they just want to see the
money.”
Since 2013, Wong has been aggressively collecting Italian
post war and contemporary art, an art world he came upon thanks to one of the
four private art advisors he has on his team: “I love to go to Italy. I love
the food, the people and many artists have been very welcoming. Somehow,
although I’ve lived in London it’s never been the case there.”
The connection and personal relationship he develops with
artists is very important to Wong, who regularly visit their studios. “The work
has a lot more meaning when you’ve met the artist. It’s not just about buying
one of their paintings directly. You become friends and that leads to more
art,” he says, adding he has become particularly good friends with Liu Xiaodong
and Zeng Fanzhi.
But he admits he doesn’t really like to buy directly from
the artists: “Sometimes the artist doesn’t want to part with his work, so you
have to do a lot of negotiation. I prefer to buy at auction, because it’s fair
competition.”
The experienced collector says he still gets a thrill
from bidding at auction and admits he can sometimes get carried away: “Four
years ago, I bought a beautiful Magritte. The auction estimate price was
something like $600,000 and it went there immediately, so I said to myself
$800,000, and it went to $1 million. I told to myself, ‘OK, bid $1 million and
if you don’t get it, forget it.’ I paid $2.7 million! But I have it now, in
Hong Kong.”
Wong never believed art should be stored in a warehouse. As
he ran out of space on the walls of his homes, the Executive Chairman of
the Parkview Group started peppering the public areas of the group’s many
properties with his acquisitions. In 2014, the art patron set up Parkview Arts
Action as an art outreach arm of the group which started its work by organizing
“On Sharks & Humanity," an environmentally-themed exhibition to raise
awareness about the plight of sharks caught for their fins. That exhibition has
toured in Monaco, Moscow, Beijing, Singapore and Hong Kong. In 2014, he also
opened the Parkview Green Museum in Beijing and this was followed by a second one
in Singapore last year (2017). The museums present thematic exhibitions drawing
primarily, though not exclusively, on Wong’s collection: “It’s just easier to
organize and control,” he explains.
“The Artist's Voice” exhibition, on show in Singapore
until March 17, explores how artists are using their arts to convey essential political,
economic and social messages that reflect and address some of the complexities of
our time. It features ambitious and thought-provoking works by 34 prominent
international artists, including Marina Abramović, Bill Viola, Wang Luyan and
Maurizio Nannucci.
Wong says he enjoys strong artworks that make him think,
and that’s clear from the selection on display. Amongst them is a powerful photograph
from the Balkan Baroque performance of Abramović at the Venice Biennale in 1997,
when, responding to human cost of the ethnically driven Yugoslav Wars, she scrubbed
clean 1,500 cow bones over four days, working six hours a day, while weeping and
singing folks songs from her native country.
“This exhibition is a very deep interrogation on what is
the narrative in contemporary art, what is the voice of the artist, what is the
message, what are they trying to say, what artists can tell us in this world
that is not very peaceful,” explains Lorand Hegyi, the Artistic Director of the
museum, who curated the exhibition.
"It is simply about what the artist says. They do not
merely paint a beautiful picture or make a sculpture; they say something with
that. There is a strong message, there is something personal, something very
much engaged with real life," Hegyi adds.
Wong is intent on continuing to share his passion with others
and is already planning to create other private museums in the buildings owned
by the Parkview Group.
(A version of this article was first published in PRESTIGE SINGAPORE (Jan 2018). The interview was conducted shortly before the passing of Mr. Wong.