With Modigliani Purchase, Chinese Billionaire Dreams of Bigger Canvas

BEIJING — Even as the cost of his quarry pulled away from the $100 million mark, Liu Yiqian remained calm.

Thus did Mr. Liu manage to secure “it” — an oil portrait of an outstretched nude woman by the early-20th-century artist Amedeo Modigliani — at a Christie’s auction in New York on Nov. 9. During the tense nine-minute sale, he beat out five opponents by offering $170.4 million with fees, thesecond-highest price ever paid for an artwork at auction.“I was on the phone with a girl from Christie’s Hong Kong who was bidding on my behalf, and she kept dropping the phone because she was so nervous,” Mr. Liu recalled in his Beijing hotel room on Friday. “I told her, ‘Why are you so nervous? I’m the one paying, and I’m not even nervous. Just buy it.’  ”

“As soon as I heard that it went to an Asian buyer, I knew it was him,” said Wang Wei, Mr. Liu’s wife, who was in Hong Kong at the time.
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“Modigliani didn’t make very many nude paintings, and this is one of his best,” she added. “It was definitely worth it.” Before last week, Mr. Liu and Ms. Wang, both 52, had already made a name for themselves in China’s art circles, he in particular as the most flamboyant of the country’s small group of major collectors. To many, he is the brash former taxi driver turned billionaire who provoked an uproar when he bought a tiny Ming dynasty porcelain cup for $36.3 million at a Sotheby’s auction — and proceeded to be photographed drinking tea from the antique vessel.

Ms. Wang is known as the driving force and general director behind the couple’s Long Museum, which has two branches in Shanghai. Over more than 20 years, the two have amassed an extensive collection of mostly traditional and contemporary Chinese art, much of it on display in the museums.

Days after their latest blockbuster purchase, Mr. Liu and Ms. Wang were back at it, flying to Beijing to attend the fall sales of a top auction house, China Guardian. They said their goal was to transform the Long Museum into a world-class destination that could compete with the likes of the Museum of Modern Art and the Guggenheim Museum in New York.

And nothing, Mr. Liu said, says world class quite like a Modigliani nude.

“Every museum dreams of having a Modigliani nude,” Mr. Liu said. “Now, a Chinese museum has a globally recognized masterpiece, and my fellow countrymen no longer have to leave the country to see a Western masterpiece. I feel very proud about that.”

He added, “The message to the West is clear: We have bought their buildings, we have bought their companies, and now we are going to buy their art.”

With his acquisition of the nude, a 1917-18 canvas known as “Nu Couché,” that message certainly seems to have gotten across.

“This purchase was a proclamation of his arrival,” said Thomas Galbraith, managing director of auctions at Paddle8, an online auction house. “Anyone in the art world who didn’t know his name knows it now.”

Mr. Liu’s rise is a classic rags-to-riches tale of post-Mao China. Growing up in a working-class family in Shanghai in the 1960s and ’70s, he said, he knew early on that he wanted to go into business. After dropping out of middle school, he began selling leather handbags, and later drove a taxi.


In 1983, he was still eking out a living as a small-time businessman when he met Ms. Wang, who was working as a typist at Shanghai Normal University.

By the late 1980s, with China’s economic liberalization in full swing, Mr. Liu said his fortunes turned as a series of investments he had made began to take off.

Today, he is chairman of the Sunline Group, a holding company based in Shanghai whose interests include chemicals, real estate development and a financial unit. In addition to owning a stake in a pharmaceutical company, he was also an early investor in Beijing Council International Auction, an auction company in the Chinese capital started by one of Ms. Wang’s friends. According to Forbes, his assets in 2015 totaled $1.22 billion.

“His decisions might seem very risky, but people forget he has spent his whole career assessing risk in the capital markets,” said Dong Guoqiang, chairman of Beijing Council and a longtime friend of the couple.

China’s art market was still in its nascent stages when Mr. Liu and Ms. Wang began going to auctions and buying art in the early 1990s. Over the years, what started as a hobby became an obsession.

While Mr. Liu preferred collecting traditional Chinese artworks and objects, Ms. Wang focused on acquiring art from the Cultural Revolution era and, later, contemporary Chinese art and art from throughout Asia. They began to collect Western artists as well, and their holdings now include work from Jeff Koons’s mirror-polished sculpture series.

Several years ago, Ms. Wang, a self-proclaimed “art fanatic,” came up with the idea of opening a museum so they could show their collection to the public. But first, she needed to persuade Mr. Liu.

“All of our friends were buying private planes, and he said he wanted to buy a plane, too,” she said. “I refused. I said let’s just put in some more money and start a museum. It will be good for Shanghai, and it will be good for the country.”

So in 2012, Mr. Liu and Ms. Wang opened the Long Museum Pudong, one of many private museums that have begun in Shanghai in recent years as the local government tries to transform the city into an international cultural capital.

In 2014, they opened a second branch, the Long Museum West Bund, part of a government-sponsored project to develop a waterfront cultural corridor in Shanghai that includes private museums, a large entertainment complex, and soon, the headquarters for DreamWorks’ new Chinese joint venture animation studio.

Exhibitions range from a large show of revolutionary art to celebrate the 70th anniversary of the end of World War II to a performance-art exhibition curated by Klaus Biesenbach of MoMA and Hans Ulrich Obrist of the Serpentine Gallery in London.

Although they received a discount from the government for the land in the West Bund area, Ms. Wang said, almost all of the operation costs — about $9.5 million for both museums this year, she estimated — are undertaken by her and her husband.

“I think the rest of my life and money will be dedicated to building up this museum,” Mr. Liu said, taking a puff of a cigarette. (The couple plan to open a third branch, in the southwest city of Chongqing, next year.)

Cai Jinqing, president of Christie’s China, said the couple represented the “best example” of this generation of Chinese art collectors.

“They started with collecting what they know, Chinese art, then broadened to Asian art, and are now embracing Western art,” Ms. Cai said.

But few collectors in China publicly flaunt their wealth the way Mr. Liu and Ms. Wang do, particularly as the government wages a crackdown on extravagance. Mr. Liu, who is still an active stock trader, said he was not concerned about the crackdown, stating that he acquired his money through legal and legitimate means.

Many have criticized the couple for profligacy and a perceived lack of taste. In discussions about them, the term “tuhao,” a popular Chinese term for crass nouveaux riches, is frequently tossed around.

“I am definitely a tuhao,” Mr. Liu said defiantly. “But at least this tuhao is bringing a masterpiece back to China for the Chinese people to enjoy.” Mr. Liu said that he had no plans to sell the painting.

There is another, more personal, benefit to the acquisition: airfare. Ms. Wang confirmed that, as in the past, she and Mr. Liu would be using their American Express card to pay for the Modigliani. That way, with the cardholder’s points they accrue, their whole family — the couple, their four children and two grandchildren — can continue flying for free.

“We are on a one-year payment plan for the painting,” Ms. Wang said. “If we had to pay cash upfront, that would be a little difficult for us.”

She added: “I mean, who has the money for that?”