Chow Sai-yiu is a major figure in Hong Kong finance and a descendant of the Lee family that founded the Bank of East Asia. Because his family had collected Chinese porcelain and ink painting since his great-grandparents’ generation, he grew up steeped in art, with an instinctive sensitivity to it and affection for it. Ten years ago, beginning with Zhang Xiaogang’s Bloodline Series, he formally set out on the path of collecting contemporary art; today, he has amassed several hundred works.
In Sai Kung, Hong Kong, Chow Sai-yiu has transformed his four-story seaside villa, with its garden, into an “art house” with only one primary bedroom. Each floor has its own artistic theme, visual logic, and circulation. Every so often, he rotates the works on view according to new acquisitions and invites friends and relatives to visit. He is also a trustee of the New Museum in New York and the youngest vice-chairman of the Hong Kong Arts Centre. For him, art is an indispensable part of life.
“I have to admit that art takes up most of my free time,” Chow told us with a laugh. In March of this year, we visited his home in Sai Kung, Hong Kong, to talk with the self-described “workaholic” collector about art, collecting, and daily life. The view from the primary bedroom of Chow’s seaside villa stretches outward; the drive from Tsim Sha Tsui to his home in Sai Kung takes about an hour. Along the way, cars and pedestrians gradually thin out, the city’s bustle and crowding fall away, and then the harbor at Pak Sha Wan comes into view, with boats at anchor and thick, lush woods. Hong Kong reveals a face less familiar to us: that of the small fishing village it once was.
“During the pandemic, for the first time in my life I stayed in this house for several months. It was so peaceful, and I really loved the time I spent here,” Chow told us, adding that he loves Sai Kung even more than the city center, where he has lived longer. In the entrance hall are Sarah Crowner’s Falling Black Shapes, Yellow and Lilac Background, 2019, and Huang Rui’s Sacrifice & Prelude, 1988. The moment we stepped inside, we saw a characteristically pieced-together painting by Sarah Crowner, a leading artist of a younger generation of geometric abstraction.
Irregular geometric forms in lilac, deep blue, and yellow are cut from separate canvases, which the artist then stitched together by hand. The work fits the entry wall exactly; Chow specially commissioned it from the artist to suit the space.
“Sarah Crowner is one of my favorite artists,” Chow told us. “The purple in the painting is actually the color of her favorite flower in Mexico City, which she used to commemorate the wonderful time she spent there. This style pays tribute to the hard-edge abstraction masters of the sixties and seventies, such as one of my favorite artists, Josef Albers.” The wall opposite has been painted a vivid red to echo the mottled, weighty, rough, intensely red brushwork in Huang Rui’s painting.
Left: Sarah Crowner, Falling Black Shapes, Yellow and Lilac Background, 2019; right: Naotaka Hiro, Untitled (Opening Night), 2022. Mika Tajima, Negative Entropy, 2015. In Chow’s living room, one of the central works is Nick Mauss’s F.S. Intervall II, 2014. “When you enter the living room, one of the main anchor works in the space is Nick Mauss’s piece.”
“When you move closer to the mirror, you realize that you become part of the dance movement,” Chow told us. The work had once been on view at the Walker Art Center in the United States for two years and was also included in the Whitney Biennial. The abstract, fragmented bodies painted into the mirror draw on Eugène Delacroix and Paul Gauguin; their freewheeling poses are folded by the mirror and extended into a new sense of space.
“For the sake of this mirror, I even moved out a set of designer sofas from the living room and repainted the wall behind it to match the Moroccan blue in the work,” Chow told us. Mounted on the wall is Kevin Beasley’s Site XV, 2022, by one of the most important Black American artists working today. Suspended high on the left wall of the living room, the large blue-violet work complements the color of the wall.
When we asked, “What is the story behind this painting?” Chow corrected us, quite seriously: “This work isn’t a painting. It’s an installation. I discovered this artist’s work at an exhibition at the New Museum in New York in 2021, and I was deeply moved by it.” The artist collected old T-shirts and loungewear, then poured melted resin over the garments, attempting to fix the memories and identities held in soft fabric into a tangible form we can perceive.
Harold Ancart, Untitled, 2013. Chow Sai-yiu looking through an art book in the living room. Beneath the installation are two tan leather Wassily Armchairs, designed by the Bauhaus artist Marcel Breuer. They once stood in Chow’s grandmother’s home, and they ended up here because he felt that their color and style were especially well suited to the artistic atmosphere of the house.
“When we first bought this house, it had four bedrooms. But to create more display space, we turned it into a house with only one primary bedroom, and the other rooms became art spaces and areas for relaxation,” Chow told us. The works on each floor are not merely hung there; each grouping has its own theme. In the dining area on the mezzanine of the second floor are Sarah Crowner’s Turning Violets and Reds, 2021, and Bridget Riley’s Measure for Measure 40, 2019. Going up to that level, we are met by another geometric collage by Crowner, this time more sumptuous, pieced together in iris purple and burgundy red with the feel of velvet.
“The second floor is one of my favorite themes: geometric abstraction. I’ve actually always been a bit of a math nerd. When I was at Brown University, I majored in applied mathematics and economics. So applying mathematics and geometry to art makes for a very interesting dialogue for me,” Chow told us. Looking down from the second floor to the first are Donald Judd’s Untitled, 1991, and Huang Rui’s Space Structure 84-15, 1984. Indeed, all the works on this level are inseparable from geometric form and abstraction.
Bridget Riley’s dotted work faces a work from the “box series” by Donald Judd, one of the founders of Minimalism. Another work by the Chinese artist Huang Rui, Space Structure 84-15, with its red ground, draws inspiration from Mondrian’s color and from Beijing courtyard houses. Left: Lesley Vance, Untitled, 2022; right: Adrian Wong, Hypnagogia VIII "Boat Shoes, Pumps", 2005-2017. Entering a room on the second floor, we find Lesley Vance’s large-scale painting, in clashing orange, blue, and green, placed beside Hong Kong artist Adrian Wong’s installation based on an old Shanghai barbershop sign; with their related colors, one still and one active, the pairing is lively and unexpectedly playful.
On the exhibition wall on the other side of the room is a set of four watercolor works on paper by the Turner Prize winner Tomma Abts. Hulda Guzman, Releasing Feelings, detail, 2022. Hulda Guzman, Releasing Feelings, detail, 2022. On the third floor, we are greeted by a giant orange sun with a smiling face, beneath which a dancer seems to move in midair.
“This is Releasing Feelings by the Dominican artist Hulda Guzman. She anthropomorphizes many elements of nature, and it’s especially playful. Many of the works on the third floor have to do with mysticism and religion,” Chow said. The arrangement on this floor, from left to right, includes Daniel Crews-Chubbs’s Where the Wild Things are (Teal), 2020, Josh Smith’s Pursuit into the Dark, 2019, and Calvin Marcus’s Blue Devil, 2018. On the opposite wall, the little blue devil and the grim reaper painted by Josh Smith both seem to summon some mysterious force.
Left: Chiharu Shiota, State of Being (Photo Album), 2022; right: Chiharu Shiota, Endless Line, 2022. Chiharu Shiota’s works in the primary bedroom on the third floor. The third floor is also home to the house’s only primary bedroom. There, two works by Shiota stand almost like monuments, storing the memories of old photographs and using the magic of “red thread” to arrest the passage of time.
The arrangement on the top floor, from left to right, includes Jonathan Gardner’s Burning Sage, 2022; Miriam Cahn’s Herumstehen, 09.05., 2006; and Chantal Joffe’s The Squid and the Whale II, 2017. The art display in the top-floor “little portrait gallery.” “The top floor, you could say, is my own little portrait gallery, and it culminates with one of my favorite Hong Kong painters, Chris Huen Sin Kan.”
The sunroom on the top floor of Chow’s home is keyed to green throughout, and everything in it has been arranged around that one work.
“We designed this room especially to face the sea and the trees, using green carpet, green furniture, and plants to create a sense of fusion,” Chow said. In the top-floor sunroom is Chris Huen Sin Kan’s Joel, 2019. We sat down to talk at sunset. Beyond the large floor-to-ceiling windows were the distinctive green trees of Sai Kung, answering the blue fishing harbor and the distant hills. As the evening light entered the room, the shadows of the potted plants almost merged with the trees outside, and the whole space was steeped in a hazy, dreamlike beauty that hardly seemed real.
“When I first saw this painting, it immediately reminded me of the scenery here in Sai Kung. The artist depicts his family, his children, his dog, his wife, and, beyond them, the houses and trees outside. Then I realized that the trees in the painting are the same kind as the ones in Sai Kung. The view outside this window is like a mirror of the painting,” Chow told us. Left: Katherine Bradford, Human Pool, 2017; right: Izumi Kato, Untitled, 2017. Left: Sanya Kantarovsky, Milker (Grant Wood), 2018; right: Sanya Kantarovsky, Untitled, 2011. The art display in the top-floor “little portrait gallery.” He says that this exquisite “little corner” on the top floor is his favorite place in the house, and that this desire to make a home beautiful comes from the atmosphere of his family.
Chow Sai-yiu with the family’s ceramic collection. “From my great-grandparents to my parents, three generations have been collectors of Chinese ceramics and ink painting, and I’ve always been inspired by them in matters of art. Ten years ago, when I began collecting contemporary art, I constantly referred back to my great-grandparents’ habits as collectors, while bringing my own taste and preferences into the system I have now.” Chow’s seriousness about art and collecting genuinely surprised us; he even hires teachers in art history and theory to give him extra lessons.
Chow Sai-yiu rehearsing a speech. It is also because of this intensity that, at such a young age, he has already become a trustee of the New Museum in New York, an early patron of M+, and the youngest vice-chairman of the Hong Kong Arts Centre. Along with bringing important Western works to Hong Kong and helping local Hong Kong artists gain international visibility, he is committed to making art and culture more grounded, so that people of any age can appreciate them. Especially striking was the fact that, on the day before our interview, he had met with the princess of Qatar as a representative of Hong Kong’s art world.
Because the conversation went so well, the princess even invited Chow to visit museums in Qatar the very next day. A photograph of Chow Sai-yiu with the princess of Qatar. Chow has always believed that collecting is a serious undertaking, one that requires continual learning, as much looking and study as possible, and the cultivation of one’s own preferences and judgment.
“One of my favorite mediums is still painting, but I also like sculpture. And in today’s digital age, I’m fascinated by technology as well, and I hope to expand my collection in digital art,” Chow said. As a patron, he is also highly supportive of younger and local artists. He is, in fact, friends with many artists and often visits their studios to see new work.
“In my view, the relationship between collectors and artists should be mutually beneficial. Without Gertrude Stein’s support, there would be no Matisse or Picasso, right?” Chow Sai-yiu at work with colleagues. “My advice to young collectors is not to chase trends. There are all kinds of people in the art world, and we need to be careful,” Chow said. When we asked how one should proceed carefully, he replied, “Use your common sense, yes.”
He blurted it out so quickly that we burst into laughter. Chow Sai-yiu, as vice-chairman, attends the opening of a new exhibition at the Hong Kong Arts Centre and gives a gallery tour to visitors. “I have to admit, I’m a bit of a workaholic. Espresso is the first thing I drink in the morning. It keeps me going through a long day.” The strength of Chow’s coffee could be startling; he gets through a full third of a jar in one go.
“Everyone says I drink too much coffee, so now I try to cut back. But to keep my energy up, I go to the gym first thing in the morning,” Chow said. Chow Sai-yiu with Angelica Cheung, the former editor-in-chief of Vogue China, and Doryun Chong, deputy director and chief curator of M+, among others. Chow Sai-yiu taking part in an art conversation on a yacht. On the day of the shoot, we followed him through “a day in the life of Chow Sai-yiu”: meetings in the morning, an exhibition opening in the afternoon, an art discussion on a yacht, and an interview and photo shoot in the evening.
By the end of it, we were exhausted and could only admire his remarkable stamina.
“A lot of people say I’m too boring, that every day is just work, and beyond that art takes up most of my free time.” The brightness in Chow’s eyes when he spoke about work confirmed the label of “workaholic.” Chow Sai-yiu celebrating his birthday in Paris, 2022. Chow Sai-yiu with his sister in front of the wall of porcelain at his parents’ home. Busy as he is, he still makes time for family and friends.
“I also rather like singing. When I get together with friends, I like to sing Cantopop.” Chow Sai-yiu’s oil still life, at right, painted with reference to a painting by Paul Cezanne, at left. “I really love sunshine and the beach, so when I’m resting, I try to take my mind off things and simply relax.” He paints in oils as well, and for him painting may be another form of rest. Chow Sai-yiu at Art Basel Hong Kong in 2023. As a major collector of contemporary art, he says he actually prefers to see exhibitions on his own.
“Because sometimes, if you go with other people, you get distracted and lose your concentration.” Chow has many trophies large and small, all awarded by traditional major print media, including repeated recognition as one of Hong Kong’s Top Ten Collectors, one of Asia’s Most Influential People, and a 40 Under 40 honoree. Most amusingly, ten years ago he also received The Most Eligible Bachelor award.