Tang Ju has been collecting since the 1990s, and over nearly thirty years he has amassed more than 1,000 works. In his collection, the artists born in the 1950s and 1960s form a complete thread: Luo Zhongli, Leng Jun, Chen Danqing, He Duoling, Zhou Chunya, Cao Li, Liu Xiaodong, Mao Yan, Yu Hong. These are artists whose works now routinely fetch tens of millions at auction, and Tang Ju brought them into his collection early. He also helped elevate Yan Ping into the kind of woman artist who becomes a phenomenon.

Chen Fei, Chen Ke, Huang Yuxing, Gao Yu, and Ouyang Chun, several of the younger mid-career artists born in the 1970s and 1980s who have surged in recent years, are now so sought-after that their work is nearly impossible to buy on the primary market. Tang Ju, though, had already begun acquiring some of their works a decade ago.

The exterior of Zuo Di No. 3. Tang Ju drawing at Zuo Di No. 3. Last year, he spent two months as a kind of general contractor, designing and drafting everything himself, then leading the workers in transforming his former home, Tang Garden, into a private museum with real warmth: Zuo Di No. 3. Inside are paintings, wine, music, and coffee; in the garden stand large sculptures and a fountain, along with clusters of cats and dogs, and even ostriches, peacocks, and geese. In March, just as the weather turned mild, we visited Zuo Di No. 3 in Beijing’s Shunyi district and spoke with the collector Tang Ju, who calls himself Don Quixote, about collecting and about life.

Tang Ju being interviewed by Yitiao. The day we arrived at Zuo Di No. 3 was the finest day of Beijing’s early spring, with sunlight that was warm to exactly the right degree and a sky of unbroken blue. Before we had even gotten out of the car, we could already see Mr. Tang standing at the entrance waving to us, a brace strapped over his right knee. When we asked whether he had injured his leg, he immediately laughed and said, by way of self-mockery, “I fell skiing in Chongli two weeks ago and didn’t pay attention.”

“It’s fine. It won’t affect today’s shoot, ha ha.” The opening felt less like an interview than like visiting an old friend, and it gave us an immediate, concrete sense of what Tang Ju means when he describes this place as “a private museum with warmth.”

At the entrance to Zuo Di No. 3. Inside, a double-height, two-story structure rises directly ahead. On the second floor, the walls are grounded in ocher; on the first, the main gallery is set against a blue-gray field, one tone calm and weighty, the other fresh, and the two complement each other. Yan Ping’s nearly four-meter-wide painting Beauty in the North hangs in the most prominent spot beyond the vestibule, its saturated color and Peking opera theatricality immediately arresting the eye.

“I made an opening exhibition out of Teacher Yan Ping’s work across thirty years because I got to know her in the 1990s and, almost without realizing it, began collecting her work, and kept at it ever since. In a way, I’ve witnessed her whole development, from Shandong to Beijing.” As Tang Ju spoke about his relationship with the artist Yan Ping, he sounded a little moved.

The title wall of Yan Ping’s solo exhibition in the first-floor gallery at Zuo Di No. 3. It is fair to say that without Tang Ju’s support, the artist Yan Ping would not hold the formidable standing she now does. Even the ring of flowers around the exhibition title was cut by Tang Ju himself from an art book and pasted onto the wall. The wall leading from the first floor to the second is also covered with paintings. Thirty works by Yan Ping are on view in the first-floor main gallery, and at the top of the stairs another new exhibition begins.

Using a photo-editing app, Tang Ju designed a poster for Chen Wenji’s Plastic Raincoat by adding the two red characters for “Still Life.” Chen Wenji, Plastic Raincoat (detail), 1995. “When I saw this work, I was deeply moved. It’s just a very simple plastic raincoat, but I felt that its composition, its color, and the intuition it gives you, the visual impact, were all especially powerful.”

The main gallery of Still Life was once the primary bedroom; now it has become a space that feels like a sitting room, and Tang Ju says his friends all like to sit there when they visit. Eighteen major still lifes by Chinese artists born in the 1950s and 1960s are gathered in the room. Main second-floor gallery of the still-life exhibition. Leng Jun, Palmistry, 1996. We saw a series of Leng Jun’s representative works, including Palmistry, Faucet, Saw, Five-Pointed Star, and Mutation: Scissors With Thorns.

“I’m especially fond of Leng Jun’s Palmistry. The artist places a very worn welding glove belonging to an electric welder on a rusted steel plate stained with oil, and it expresses a kind of praise for laborers,” Tang Ju said. Cao Li, Dragon-Horse Series, 2006. Above is Leng Jun’s Mutation: Scissors With Thorns. Leng Jun, Mutation: Scissors With Thorns, 2000. “And then there’s a small pair of scissors. Back at the first National Small Oil Painting Exhibition, that work even won a prize.”

Ji Dachun’s High Heels, Liu Xiangdong’s Late Autumn 4, Xu Qingfeng’s Cockscomb Flower, Xu Mangyao’s studio series, and Cao Li’s Dragon-Horse series are placed side by side; their palettes are all comparatively muted. The large-scale work on the right is Yu Hong’s Toy Doll, 1999. Then Yu Hong’s bright large-format oil painting Toy Doll breaks the chromatic deadlock and lights up the whole room. She has painted two blond toy dolls: children’s playthings, plainly enough, yet carrying a strange sadness mixed with confusion.

The still-life exhibition on the second floor of Zuo Di No. 3. Xu Mangyao, Sculpture Studio Series III: Coloring, 1993. “The still lifes by these Chinese artists really are not simple pictures of objects. They’re quite spiritual. What I value more are works by artists born in the 1950s and 1960s from before 2000. They’re especially important.” The central line of Tang Ju’s collection follows Chinese artists born in the 1950s and 1960s; he himself belongs to the 1960s, and the overlap in historical memory and feeling gives him an especially strong resonance with these works.

Beyond the still lifes specially shown here, the room also contains sculptures by Xiang Jing, Wei Xiaoming, and Zhang Dali, revealing the broader range of media in Tang Ju’s collection. Chen Danqing, Tibet Series, Going to Town No. 3, 1981. There is also one painting that slips in from another category: Chen Danqing’s Tibet Series, Going to Town No. 3, which Tang Ju hung specially for our visit.

“This is the work I spent the most money on. There’s an interesting story behind it. Ten years ago, at an auction preview, I was moved by it, and later I kept bidding all the way up to 23 million yuan and got the painting. But when I got it, I still didn’t know where the money was going to come from.” Later, Tang Ju sold office space, mortgaged paintings, and juggled things in every possible way before he finally managed to bring this “great deity” home.

“At the time there was no WeChat. I just shared it with friends by text message, and I felt ecstatic.” Tang Ju during installation. Tang Ju seems to like doing everything himself. He acts quickly, and plainly enjoys it.

“These galleries you see now were installed by just three of us: me, my driver, and Old Zhang the gardener. That’s how it will be in the future too,” Tang Ju told us. He moved into this house, which from the beginning was designed for art, seventeen years ago. Since arriving, he has never stopped “tinkering” with it. It used to be called Tang Garden, and in collecting and art circles it had already acquired a modest reputation.

The exterior of Zuo Di No. 3. A side hall on the first floor, beside the bar. “I always hoped to find a place for these paintings and this collection that would suit them in a natural setting. Around 2004, a close friend of mine was holding an event at his equestrian club. On my way there, I happened to pass this piece of land. It was completely wild, with weeds more than a meter high. I traded a work of art to that friend for this plot, which was a little over eight mu.”

Zuo Di No. 3 during construction. Last year he spent two months designing the plans himself, marking dimensions on site, and working every day alongside the laborers. In that brief span, he turned his former home into the private museum it is now.

“I have quite a lot in the collection, and I recently went through it seriously. Sculptures, oil paintings, and some drawings and watercolors on paper: altogether there are now nearly 1,000 works.”

First-floor gallery at Zuo Di No. 3. “I’ve always had a dream of making a museum, but doing a big one wasn’t realistic. You could say that dream collapsed. So I thought I should turn this into a small private museum, something interesting, something with warmth.” Beyond artists born in the 1950s and 1960s, Tang Ju says that ten years ago he also began supporting younger artists born in the 1970s and 1980s; he has now realized that he owns more than a hundred of their works too, including artists like Chen Fei, Chen Ke, and Gao Yu, whose paintings have been almost impossible to obtain in recent years.

He says his plan is to stage four collection exhibitions a year, along with a number of smaller projects, and to keep the museum’s calendar full. In a first-floor side room, the sofa set was designed in collaboration with an artist. The idea of “warmth,” meanwhile, does run through the museum. After seeing the exhibition, we sat in the side room on a sofa Tang Ju designed, beside the bar, and had a cup of coffee.

“This used to be our family living room, with sofas, and we’ve kept a small bar too. In the evenings, sometimes there are gatherings here, and you can listen to music with friends, chat, and drink whisky.” Tang Ju said that although he no longer lives here, the atmosphere of daily life remains. In the adjoining room beyond, there is a seventeen-meter temperature-controlled swimming pool, with a Mondrian chair and various pieces of designer furniture set beside it.

“Now this has become a small resting space. Sometimes I sit here by myself and flip through art books,” Tang Ju said. Most of the furniture in the room was in fact designed by Tang Ju himself, including the sofas, chandeliers, dining table, and even the large floor-to-ceiling window. Tang Ju with the furniture he designed. “My father was an art teacher at a middle school, and because of that I liked drawing from the time I was young. I drew all those design plans and construction sketches myself.”

“Of course, in a very unprofessional way,” Tang Ju said with a laugh. Tang Ju leafing through an art book in the lounge. As he spoke with us, Tang Ju kept saying that he had been “short of money” when collecting. It sounded improbable, and yet it also sounded exactly true.

“Collecting is a bottomless pit. I buy work impulsively. It’s hormones and possessiveness. When I come across a work that moves me and makes my eyes light up, it becomes hard to let go, so sometimes I really do end up strapped for cash.” He said that when he first started collecting, he never thought about selling; he bought simply because he liked the work. Leng Jun, Cultural Relics: New Product Design, 1993, consigned by Tang Ju to China Guardian’s spring auction in 2022 and sold for 48.30 million yuan. Later, as his collecting line centered on Chinese artists born in the 1950s and 1960s gradually became clearer and stronger, Tang Ju wanted, almost like stamp collecting, to gather representative works by every major artist. Mortgaging, financing, selling property: he did plenty of that too.

Leng Jun, Mona Lisa: Design Concerning a Smile, 2004, sold for 80.50 million yuan; a print of the work hangs in the kitchen area at Zuo Di No. 3. Zhao Bandi, On That Morning, 1990, consigned by Tang Ju in 2020 and sold for 28.75 million yuan. “But by the year before last, there was no other way. I had to face reality. I couldn’t keep going like that, could I? So I finally let go of a few works that in the past I absolutely never would have sold, the ones everyone knows, the works worth many tens of millions, such as Leng Jun’s Mona Lisa and Engine, Zhao Bandi’s On That Morning, and a huge Zhou Chunya painting, Mountain Rocks and Mist.”

Tang Ju told us that, from the outside, the three pandemic years looked like his “harvest season,” and countless people in the field praised the sharpness of his eye and the accuracy of his bets on artists. In fact, he said, he had no choice: he sold five major works that he treasured deeply in order to solve the most basic problem of life, being “short of money.” Zhou Chunya, Mountain Rocks and Mist, 2003, consigned by Tang Ju in 2020 and sold for 43.70 million yuan. Since coming to Beijing in 1999, Tang Ju has in fact been a very pure full-time collector.

He has gone from one auction room to another specifically for works of art, and many stories have come out of it.

“The first time I remember attending China Guardian’s spring special sale for oil painting, it was a tiny room, with just one or two sparse rows of people sitting in front. At the time, with a little over 1 million renminbi, I bought 40 percent of the entire sale total. Works by Leng Jun and Liu Xiaodong were very easy to acquire. Looking back now, it’s unimaginable.” Tang Ju said that he had not set out from the beginning to collect artists born in the 1950s and 1960s. At the time, he did not have especially clear ideas; he was somewhat opportunistic.

Wu Guanzhong, Yangtze River, Ten Thousand Miles, 1973-1974. “Back in 2003 and 2004, I even bought a paper handscroll by Mr. Wu Guanzhong, more than five meters long, Yangtze River, Ten Thousand Miles. I paid 10 million for it then, which truly was an astronomical price. A lot of people thought I was crazy.” Tang Ju said that he eventually sold it because he felt a paper work that had to be rolled up was too fragile: “A work this precious, I was afraid it would be ruined in my hands.”

He gave a self-mocking smile. Chen Yifei, Warm Spring in the Jade Hall, 1993. “More than ten years ago, I went specially to Shanghai for Mr. Chen Yifei’s Warm Spring in the Jade Hall. I estimated it would sell for 10 million, and thought I was going in prepared, but everyone knows what happened in the end. That painting became a much-watched lot and sold for more than 100 million renminbi. It was bought by my younger friend Zhou Dawei. Now the painting is in the Long Museum.”

Tang Ju spoke of these experiences of missing out on works he loved with notable calm.

“You can’t even call them failures, because things like that happen too often. You simply don’t have enough disappointment for all of them.” Zuo Di No. 3 is especially beautiful at sunset. The outdoor bicycle and gear gallery, with colorful frames painted by the artist Chen Fei. As we talked with Tang Ju, the sun dropped before we noticed, and he stood up to take us out into the garden. The origin of the outdoor gallery is especially interesting: it had originally been Tang Ju’s greenhouse for growing vegetables. After it was remade as part of Zuo Di No. 3, he added a roof over the former garden plot and turned it into a white, minimalist space for displaying collectible bicycles and artist-designed skis and skateboards.

The most striking thing in the gallery is a brightly colored bicycle frame spray-painted for Tang Ju by the artist Chen Fei. Tang Ju with Chen Fei’s Fierce Eyes. Chen Fei, Fierce Eyes (detail), 2010. Tang Ju has also collected quite a few works by Chen Fei, an artist born in the 1980s. The best-known among them is Fierce Eyes, with its red steed in a green jungle. He said that in early April he plans to stage a small exhibition devoted to this work. Chen Fei, Climbing Art’s Highest Peak, 2015. “Chen Fei is an artist of the 1980s generation I especially like. This month I just acquired his Climbing Art’s Highest Peak.”

“I negotiated it up from a little more than 3 million to more than 5 million for myself. I like outdoor sports. The composition of this painting is just two people in outdoor gear, carrying backpacks, with a snow mountain in front of them, and it moved me deeply.” Tang Ju skiing off-piste. Tang Ju crossing the most perilous section of the Great Wall. When the subject turned to outdoor sports, Tang Ju came alive. He did not seem at all like someone nearing sixty, especially given that his pursuits are skiing, skateboarding, mountaineering, and cycling, all of them somewhat dangerous.

Tang Ju skateboarding in his own courtyard. Tang Ju cycling the Sichuan-Tibet route. “In my birthday month the year before last, I did the Sichuan-Tibet route. In twenty-seven days I rode more than 2,100 kilometers, and several times I came very close to being done for. Once a small falling rock hit the wheel rim of my bike.”

“Another time, the altitude sickness combined with an extremely punishing uphill stretch left me completely dazed. My mind and my limbs were totally disconnected, and I couldn’t control the bike. So I don’t recommend that anyone my age do this.” Before he had even finished speaking, he was already laughing. Once we reached the garden, we saw three large sculptures by Wei Xiaoming, a professor at the Academy of Arts & Design, Tsinghua University. Facing the entrance, standing in the fountain, was a work the artist made during the SARS period; only three were made at the time, and the other two were collected by government institutions.

Another piece, a pink gorilla tethered with rope and bending forward on a slope to gaze into the distance, seemed to be gathering some long-suppressed force. It is a new work by Cao Hui, a professor at the Central Academy of Fine Arts, which Tang Ju bought at China Guardian last year.

“See the blue rope around its foot? We tied that on ourselves, because we were afraid the wind would blow it away.” Abruptly, Tang Ju made us laugh again. On the slope to the right of the garden is a small zoo.

“I’ve adopted a lot of animals. Some were gifts from friends, and some were animals they couldn’t keep, so I took them in. There are six dogs in all, plus peacocks, ostriches, and geese that have already reached the third generation. Do you know? Geese are fierce. They bully the peacocks.” That was how Tang Ju put it.

“Once, a peacock even wandered off, and in the end the police brought it back.” Even as the interview was drawing to a close, Tang Ju’s stories still showed no sign of ending. Tang Ju preparing for a new exhibition at Zuo Di No. 3. Tang Ju posting photos on Moments from a small gathering with friends. “I’m probably the most frequent poster on Moments among my friends. I think semi-retirement suits me pretty well. I’m past the most aggressive phase of collecting now, and I also think you shouldn’t follow so-called trends too much. You have to use your eyes and your inner life to feel what a work brings you, whether it moves you, whether it makes you unable to walk away.”