This year, we visited the distinctive homes of collectors from finance, the arts, industry, architecture, hospitality, and media—including people who have made collecting a profession. From collectors born in the 1950s and 1960s to those born in the 1980s and 1990s, each could trace the stories behind the works in their homes: encounters with artists, the frustration of losing a beloved piece, and the moments when a work seemed to speak directly to them.
In their homes, a chair, a small sculpture, or a modest painting might open onto a whole chain of stories. Here are the singularly beautiful homes of the collectors we visited this year. Collector Ellie Lai, known in the media as the “Flute Princess,” was born into a middle-class family. She studied music from an early age, later entering a conservatory and joining a symphony orchestra. She performed alongside international musical legends including Pavarotti, Domingo, Fou Ts’ong, and Yo-Yo Ma, and released recording albums that sold in astonishing numbers.
She now has several additional identities: art collector, patron, Tate Museum committee member, and operator of a major art hotel. Since 2005, she has collected more than a thousand works of art. She has also become friends with major contemporary artists including Zhou Chunya, Liu Ye, Weng Xuesong, and Yuan Zhan. In her Taipei home, Lai’s life resembles a roller coaster. After a failed marriage, a painting by the Impressionist artist Renoir brought her together with Tsai Chenyang, the head of Taipei’s Humble House Group.
After they married, she joined her husband in the hotel business, beginning as an art director and overseeing design, construction, and art operations. Together, they turned five major hotels into the publicly listed Humble House company, known for its art collections and distinct artistic themes. From the balcony of Lai’s home, one looks out across Taipei. Located in the Zhongshan District, where she has lived since childhood, the expansive apartment faces the landmark Songshan Airport and offers views of Taipei 101 and the city beyond.
The home is filled with works of art, while the balcony is crowded with the green plants she loves.
“I don’t actually know how many works are in the house. I haven’t counted them carefully. But I often change the art at home according to my mood and the things I’m going through,” she told us. The paintings are chiefly contemporary. Just inside the entrance is a work by James Casebere. The artist first constructs an architectural model, then lights and photographs it, creating a sense of scenography. The concept is strikingly avant-garde.
In Lai’s study, the works hang in conversation. Left: Tsuguharu Foujita, Reclining Nude, 1931. Right: Xu Hualing, Between 57, 2016. One is by the Japanese modern artist Foujita, who used traditional ink-brush techniques in oil painting, combining Western methods with ukiyo-e and East Asian ink painting. Beside it hangs Xu Hualing’s Between 57. Xu also paints women, blending traditional gongbi brushwork with photography in a distinctive style; the treatment of the lines and distant ink-painted mountains is exceptionally delicate.
The furniture in Lai’s study is made from old zitan wood, with a desk and official’s hat chairs modeled on Ming-dynasty forms. On the display shelf sits a cloisonné water vessel, its chi-dragon form and filigree work finely executed, a product of the Qianlong period of the Qing dynasty. In Lai’s office hangs Zhou Chunya’s Walking Black Root, 2005. She has also become friends with many artists through collecting, and has visited the studios of major artists including Zhang Xiaogang, Antony Gormley, and Zhou Chunya.
“I think the most interesting thing is that you can see how they work, and then speak with them face-to-face.” Works collected by Lai include Yuan Zhan’s Little Bird on a Branch Is Also a Friend, 2008, and, in the dining room, Weng Xuesong’s Stone Series No. 12, 2015. When she speaks of her relationships with artists, Lai has a store of stories at the ready.
“The work by Weng Xuesong in the dining room is the largest piece in the house. We’re especially close. When I go to Beijing, I visit his home and eat the Chongqing-style boiled yellow catfish he cooks himself. And whenever I visit Ms. Yuan Zhan, I bring her and her husband delicious Taiwanese desserts.” Lai’s furniture follows a deliberately mixed style. For her, home is a place to rest and recover, so she combines furniture casually: a sofa she has used for more than twenty years sits alongside Scandinavian designs and Chinese furniture.
Lai’s dog and dogs painted by an artist. “Sometimes I add a little humor to the collection. These small-animal works are by the same Spanish artist. He made a series with dogs and squirrels, and even little lambs and pigs. They’re charming and comforting. A love of art seems to be something encoded in my genes,” Lai said with a laugh. Qian Yao’s home in Taipei. Qian Yao was a celebrated lyricist and producer during the golden age of Mandarin pop. He has worked closely with CoCo Lee, Faye Wong, Harlem Yu, Sandy Lam, and Rene Liu.
After spending most of his life immersed in popular music, he now jokingly calls himself “a has-been musician.” In semi-retirement, Qian has devoted all his energy to a passion that has lasted thirty years: art collecting. For more than twenty years, he traveled back and forth between Beijing and Taipei, filling both homes with paintings he had collected over the years. In autumn and winter, he lives in a four-story villa in the mountains outside Taipei, accompanied by Pan Yuliang, Sanyu, Antony Gormley, Giorgio Morandi, Liu Ye, Liu Xiaodong, Xu Beihong, and others—figures of renown in art history.
Qian Yao’s home in Beijing. In spring and summer, he lives in an old apartment beside Beijing’s Wangjing 798 Art District, surrounded by works by younger Chinese artists. A fifteen-minute bike ride takes him almost everywhere he needs to go: buying flowers and groceries, visiting exhibitions in 798, dropping by artists’ studios, and browsing bookstores.
“I often describe my Beijing home as a study. It’s about 110 square meters: one living room, one kitchen, and two bedrooms, one larger master bedroom and one smaller guest room that doubles as a study.” The gray wall just inside Qian’s home faces the entrance. Three paintings hang on it, leaving a broad expanse of gray wall bare.
“I used to cover this wall with paintings. At its fullest, there might have been twenty or thirty. Recently I suddenly wanted some blank space and realized that my gray wall is quite beautiful. There are about ten paintings in the living room now.” Guo Longyao, Golden House—Thorn Rose, 2019. Behind the black sofa is a large work by Guo Longyao, a young artist from a small town near Tianshui in Gansu. The painting’s intense relationship between northwestern China and the land seems to rush toward the viewer; green plants grow with near-ferocity.
“When I look at the painting, I can almost imagine eating those big bowls of noodles there, with the villagers’ voices rising and falling around me. Then I suddenly return to memories of my childhood. I lived in a military dependents’ village in Taiwan. The girl who played marbles with me there was especially fierce, and I find that deeply moving.” Dong Dawei, Landscape Portrait of Jilan, Approx. 03, 2022. Qian seems particularly adept at discovering artists whose work is rich in narrative and performance.
This work, which one might mistake for a bedroom door, is a landscape painted on the wooden frame of an old residence.
“The artist Dong Dawei handles the work in the manner of Western classicism, like the landscape behind the Mona Lisa by Leonardo da Vinci. Even the door’s weathering is painted,” Qian said. Qian’s bedroom in Beijing. Qian has long had the habit of hanging his favorite paintings in his bedroom. Though the room is not large, more than ten works of varying sizes cover its walls. The two largest are by Xia Junna and Sun Yitian, female artists from China’s 1970s and 1990s generations who have attracted considerable attention.
Facing the head of the bed is Zhang Yexing’s Hunting in Dreamland-2. Qian’s home in Taipei. If the Beijing apartment resembles Qian’s study, the four-story villa outside Taipei is his own small world. The house measures more than 400 square meters. Along the staircase from the first to the second floor are portraits of women, rendered with lively detail and a gentle touch. The first floor opens directly onto the garden. It is unusually transparent, with windows on all four sides and views of a roughly 40-square-meter courtyard where the vegetation grows thick and exuberant.
“The courtyard is like a little Eden. I planted a single-petaled gardenia tree and placed a sculpture by Antony Gormley there.” The dining room on the first floor. The works there concern landscapes and still lifes. The classical styles of Peter Paul Rubens, Chaim Soutine, and Jan Brueghel the Elder create an engaging counterpoint to the courtyard outside. In the kitchen, Qian uses a single installation by Song Dong, made from old wood, as a partition.
Qian’s study. The study on the third floor is where he spends most of his time. Paintings of different sizes cover the walls, which rise five meters to the ceiling; on the other side is a huge floor-to-ceiling window, and books cover the floor. Although the Taipei house is large, Qian’s bedroom measures only a dozen or so square meters—no larger than the bedroom in his Beijing home.
“I like sleeping in small spaces. They make me feel more secure,” he said. As in Beijing, the small paintings in the bedroom are Qian’s private favorites.
“I can’t bear to leave my Sanyu paintings. When I open my eyes, I want to see them.” Paintings in Qian’s Taipei home. The particular magnetism different artists bring to their work often keeps Qian enthralled.
“I can be like a ‘scumbag’ and fall in love with many artists at once. That’s part of the pleasure of collecting,” Qian said with a laugh. Tang Ju, a collector, began collecting in the 1990s. Nearly thirty years later, he has amassed more than 1,000 works and is known in Chinese art circles as a professional collector. His collection traces a substantial lineage of artists born in the 1950s and 1960s: Luo Zhongli, Leng Jun, Chen Danqing, He Duoling, Zhou Chunya, Cao Li, Liu Xiaodong, Mao Yan, Yu Hong, and others.
Works by these artists, now routinely selling for tens of millions at auction, entered Tang’s collection early. He also helped propel Yan Ping, a phenomenon among female artists, to prominence. Works by Yan Ping in Tang’s collection. Chen Fei, Chen Ke, Huang Yuxing, Gao Yu, and Ouyang Chun—several artists of the 1970s and 1980s generations who have become major names in recent years—are so sought-after that they are nearly impossible to buy on the primary market. Tang, however, had already acquired some of their works ten years ago. Last year, he spent two months acting as a “construction foreman,” designing and drawing the plans himself and leading workers in transforming his former home, “Tang Garden,” into “No. 3 Zuodi,” a private museum filled with warmth.
Exterior of “No. 3 Zuodi.” Entrance to “No. 3 Zuodi.” He has lived in this house, designed from the outset for artworks, for seventeen years. Including the garden, it covers more than 5,000 square meters. Since moving in, he has continually “fiddled with” it; the place has acquired a modest reputation in collecting and art circles.
“No. 3 Zuodi” is a two-story building with soaring ceilings. Yan Ping’s nearly four-meter-wide painting Northern Beauty hangs in the most conspicuous position just beyond the entrance. Its intense colors and the theatrical force of Peking opera make an immediate impression. At the top of the second-floor staircase, Chen Wenji’s yellow Plastic Raincoat stands out among the other paintings.
“When I saw this work, I was deeply moved. The visual impact was extraordinarily strong,” Tang said. The former master bedroom has been converted into a sitting room. “Friends all like to sit here,” Tang said. Eighteen major still-life paintings by Chinese artists born in the 1950s and 1960s hang in the room. Leng Jun, Palmistry, 1996. Above it hangs Leng Jun’s Mutation—Spiked Scissors. The room also contains a series of Leng Jun’s representative works, including Palmistry, Faucet, Saw, Five-Pointed Star, and Mutation—Spiked Scissors.
There are also works by Cao Li, Yu Hong, Zhang Peili, and Xiang Jing. The most important work in the room is Chen Danqing’s Tibet series, Entering the City No. 3. Chen Danqing, Tibet series, Entering the City No. 3, 1981. “This is the most expensive work I’ve ever bought. Ten years ago, I fell in love with it at first sight. At auction I kept raising my paddle until 23 million, and when I won it, I still didn’t know where the money would come from.” Tang eventually sold office buildings, mortgaged paintings, and shifted funds in every possible way before bringing this “deity” home.
“There was no WeChat at the time. I sent text messages to share the news with my friends. I was delirious with happiness,” he said.
“I’ve always wanted to create a museum, but making a large one isn’t realistic. So I thought: why not turn the house into a small, interesting, warm private museum?” The side hall on the first floor, formerly part of the living room, has been preserved. Side hall on the first floor. “Sometimes we have gatherings at night. When friends come, we sit on the sofa and at the bar I designed, listen to music, chat, and drink whiskey,” Tang said. Farther along is a seventeen-meter-long temperature-controlled swimming pool, beside which stand Mondrian chairs and other designer furnishings.
“This is a small place to rest. I sometimes sit here and leaf through art books.” “No. 3 Zuodi” at sunset. The outdoor bicycle and sporting-goods showroom. The colorful frames were spray-painted by the artist Chen Fei. The outdoor showroom was originally Tang’s greenhouse for growing vegetables. After converting it into a private museum, he roofed the garden and created a minimalist white space for collectible bicycles and artist-designed skis and skateboards.
In the garden, we saw three large sculptures by Wei Xiaoming, a professor at the Academy of Arts and Design, Tsinghua University. A large pink gorilla tethered with a rope is a new work by Cao Hui, a professor at the Central Academy of Fine Arts, which Tang bought at China Guardian last year. Cao Hui’s sculpture in the garden. An ostrich in Tang’s small zoo. The slope on the right side of the garden is a small zoo.
“I’ve adopted many animals: six dogs, as well as peacocks, ostriches, and geese that have already bred into a third generation,” Tang said.
“Once, a peacock even went missing. In the end, the police brought it back.” He laughed as he told the story. Leng Jun, Mona Lisa—A Design for the Smile, 2004. After Tang consigned the work to auction, it sold for 80.5 million yuan, making it one of the best-known works he ever owned. A print of the work hangs in the kitchen area of “No. 3 Zuodi.” “I’m often short of money,” Tang said. “Collecting is a bottomless pit. I buy works impulsively—it’s hormones and the desire to possess—so sometimes I’m genuinely stretched thin.”
As a result, the year before last he had to sell several pieces from the back of the cupboard—the works everyone knew, each worth tens of millions: Leng Jun’s Mona Lisa and Engine, Zhao Bandi’s On That Morning, and a huge Mountain, Rocks, and Smoke and Clouds by Zhou Chunya.
“I have to take care of life’s most basic needs, right?” he said. Zhou Shiyao and his ceramic collection. Zhou’s seaside villa in Sai Kung, Hong Kong. Collector Zhou Shiyao is a major figure in Hong Kong finance and a descendant of the Li family, which founded The Bank of East Asia. His great-grandparents collected Chinese porcelain and ink paintings, and growing up around them gave him an instinctive sensitivity to and affection for art. Ten years ago, he began collecting contemporary art in earnest with a work from Zhang Xiaogang’s Bloodline series. He now owns several hundred pieces.
In Sai Kung, he transformed his four-story seaside villa with a garden into an “art house” with a single master bedroom. Each floor has its own artistic theme and circulation. At the entrance: Sarah Crowner, Falling Black Shapes, Yellow and Lilac Background, 2019. Huang Rui, Sacrifice & Prelude, 1988. Just inside, we encountered a characteristic collaged painting by Sarah Crowner, a leading figure among a younger generation of geometric abstractionists.
The work fits the entrance wall exactly; Zhou commissioned the artist to make it specifically for the foyer. The wall opposite has been painted entirely bright red, echoing the mottled, heavy, rough, intensely red brushwork of Huang Rui’s painting. Zhou’s living room. Central work in the living room: Nick Mauss, F.S. Intervall II, 2014. The installation on the wall is by Kevin Beasley, Site XV, 2022. Beasley is one of the most important Black artists working in the United States today. In the living room, we see a huge mirror. The abstract, fragmented bodies painted within it and their uninhibited poses recall works by the French Romantic painter Eugène Delacroix and the post-Impressionist Paul Gauguin.
“For this mirror, I moved out a set of designer sofas from the living room. I repainted the wall behind it to match the Moroccan blue in the work,” Zhou told us. A large blue-violet work hangs high on the left wall, complementing the color of the room. The artist collected old T-shirts and house clothes, then poured melted resin over the garments, attempting to solidify the memories and identities held in soft fabric into a tangible work.
Harold Ancart, Untitled, 2013. Zhou looking through an art book in the living room. Beneath the installation are two brownish-yellow leather Wassily chairs designed by the Bauhaus artist Marcel Breuer. They have special significance: they once stood in Zhou’s grandmother’s home.
“Every time we sit in these chairs, we think of the wonderful memories of our childhood and grandparents.” Dining area on the second floor. Sarah Crowner, Turning Violets and Reds, 2021. Bridget Riley, Measure for Measure 40, 2019. Left: Donald Judd, Untitled, 1991. Right: Huang Rui, Spatial Structure 84-15, 1984. “The second floor is one of my favorite themes: geometric abstraction.”
“I’ve always been a bit of a ‘math geek,’” Zhou said with a laugh. Looking around, the works on the second floor are indeed inseparable from geometric forms and abstraction. Sarah Crowner’s geometric collages and Bridget Riley’s polka-dot works face pieces from Donald Judd’s “box series,” by one of the founders of Minimalism. Another work by the Chinese artist Huang Rui, Spatial Structure 84-15, with its red ground, draws inspiration from Mondrian’s colors and the courtyard houses of Beijing.
Left: Lesley Vance, Untitled, 2022. Right: Adrian Wong, Hypnagogia VIII “Boat Shoes, Pumps,” 2005–2017. In a second-floor recreation room, Lesley Vance’s large-scale painting of clashing orange, blue, and green is set beside a sign installation resembling an old Shanghai hair salon by Hong Kong artist Adrian Wong. Similar colors, one work still and the other kinetic, make a convincing pairing.
On the exhibition wall on the other side of the room is a set of four watercolor works on paper by Turner Prize winner Tomma Abts. Hulda Guzman, Radiating Emotion, 2022. The works on the third floor, from left to right: Daniel Crew Chubbs, Where the Wild Things Are (Teal), 2020; Josh Smith, Pursuit into the Dark, 2019; Calvin Marcus, Blue Devil, 2018. The third floor takes up the themes of mysticism and religion.
Hulda Guzman’s Radiating Emotion, the small blue devil, and the Grim Reaper painted by Josh Smith all seem to summon some mysterious force. Left: Chiharu Shiota, State of Being (Photo Album), 2022. Right: Chiharu Shiota, Endless Line, 2022. The villa’s only master bedroom is also on the third floor.
In the room, Chiharu Shiota’s two works stand like monuments, storing the memory of old photographs and using the magic of red thread to freeze the passage of time. Chris Huen Sin Kan, Joel, detail, 2019. Sunroom on the top floor. Through the sunroom’s floor-to-ceiling windows, one can see boats moored in Haku Shui Wan harbor, the sea, and dense, luxuriant woods. The entire room is arranged around a large-scale work by the Hong Kong artist Chris Huen Sin Kan.
The painting depicts the artist’s wife, child, and pet dog, as well as the houses and trees visible from their home.
“We designed this room specifically, using plants and carpeting to create the setting. The painting and the view outside the windows here in Sai Kung are like a mirror image,” Zhou said. Artworks displayed on the top floor. “I’ve always felt that it’s best not to chase trends in collecting. There are all kinds of people in the art world, and we need to be careful,” Zhou said. When asked how one should proceed cautiously, he replied, “Use your common sense. Exactly,” and immediately burst out laughing.
Collector Saosao, interviewed by Yit. Saosao, a Beijing-based collector born in the 1970s, trained in interior design and rose to vice president of an A-share-listed company. After falling in love with contemporary art collecting, she voluntarily stepped back from her position. Over more than six years, she acquired more than 100 contemporary works, gradually filling her home beyond capacity. She and her family therefore moved into a new home near Beijing’s Fifth Ring Road: 700 square meters, furnished by Saosao herself. The second basement floor was set aside for art salons and small exhibitions, where old and new friends—and even curious neighbors who had heard about the place—gather to talk and look at art.
Saosao’s second basement floor. Her new home extends across five levels and measures 700 square meters; with the garden, it covers nearly 1,000 square meters. It is bright, with good natural light and high ceilings, and the early-spring sun fills the rooms. As the woman of the house, Saosao once again took on the interior design. Although she has not worked as a designer, she trained in interior design and has now personally renovated ten homes. On the right side of the first-floor home is Xu Hongxiang’s A Tree in the Distance No. 3, 2020. Entering the living room, the most conspicuous feature is a purple sofa. Beyond it stands a large tree, like a welcoming pine.
The work is by Xu Hongxiang, an artist born in the 1980s, and was made in 2020. His landscapes are generally saturated in color, free, and full of a wild energy; this work is typical. In it, the pine grows unchecked within the halo of the setting sun. On the first floor, a work by Huang Yuxing, Blue Bed, separates the living and dining areas. Beside it is Gao Xiaowu’s sculpture Rebirth: Carp. On the far-right wall is Du Qiurui’s installation Plastic Tears of the Plastic Flower Sisters, 2021. Huang’s Blue Bed serves as the partition between the living room and dining room.
“I fell for this installation the moment I saw it.” Gao Xiaowu, Rebirth: Carp, 2016. Paired with the work’s flowing atmosphere is Gao’s sculpture Rebirth: Carp. Saosao placed a lamp above it. When the light falls on the sculpture’s multicolored stainless steel, it reflects onto the ceiling, creating the effect of rippling water. At night especially, the moving light and the static blue ripples reflect one another. Dining area on the first floor. Li Qing, Landscape with Lego: The Forbidden City, 2021. Entering the dining area, one encounters two “windows.”
One comes from Li Qing and is titled Landscape with Lego: The Forbidden City. Li likes collecting old wooden window frames and using them as picture frames, placing painted images behind the openings to create a double view. In 2021, the artist painted the Hall of Supreme Harmony in the Forbidden City for the first time. Saosao is a native Beijinger who went to the Palace Museum on school outings from childhood, and she quickly decided to acquire the work. The white sculpture at the far right of the painting is Gao Xiaowu’s Dream Return No. 2. In the center of the first-floor living room is Li Binyuan’s installation Rumor, 2020. The contemporary sculptor Li Binyuan’s Rumor and the young artist Gao Xiaowu’s Dream Return No. 2 unexpectedly enter into dialogue here.
“Arranging these works at home so that they relate to one another is a very interesting thing.” Second basement floor: Liu Wuli, Leap, 2021. Saosao’s home might be described as “riotously colorful.” On first entering, one can almost feel unsure where to look.
“I may be a maximalist and an eclectic,” she said. The second basement floor is devoted entirely to art. Saosao had a skylight cut into the ceiling, creating generous natural light and headroom, and added special moisture protection. A circular work on the wall in one corner is Huang Yuxing’s Changing History of Life, 2008. Saosao speaking with the artist Zhou Bin. In March 2025, she and the young artist Zhou Bin immediately found common ground and organized an exhibition here. It lasted half a month. Though small in scale, it had a formal poster, opening, and speeches by the curator and artist; she also thoughtfully prepared gifts for the guests.
Dozens of friends from the art world came, and neighbors from the same residential compound, having heard about the show, also stopped by. First-floor living room, far left: TUTU, Smoking Woman, 2022. Second-floor recreation area, left: Cai Jian, Horizontal FG20220818007, 2021. Right: Chen Linggang, Reading Series: Cloud 210205, 2021. For Saosao, the greatest benefit of holding exhibitions at home is that they bring people closer to art. When artworks are placed in a domestic setting, the artists seem almost like friends beside you, and everyone can speak with ease.
She does not attach much importance to the idea of a “collecting lineage.”
“People always ask me about a lineage. But once I’ve collected something and it becomes part of my life, that is my personal lineage.”