The collector Grace Cheung is an internationally renowned architect and the first Chinese woman to receive the AIA International Architecture Design Award. She began collecting art in 2005, and has been doing so for 19 years. Her holdings include works by Gerhard Richter, Jeff Koons, Do Ho Suh, Cai Guo-Qiang, Sterling Ruby, Olafur Eliasson, and other prominent Chinese and international artists.

For her, architecture and art are both essential parts of life. When she first began collecting, she had a sharp eye: she bought work by Banksy, now the most feverishly priced and enigmatic figure in graffiti art.

“At the time, at a very small exhibition in Taipei, I bought one of his works for very little money, so little that I can’t say now,” Grace said with a laugh. “That painting is still hanging in my home.” The Banksy work in Grace’s home, Monkey Queen, 2003. Image source: Grace. The Hong Foundation, which she runs, was founded in 1971; after the launch of the Mi Project in 2014, she began leading it, supporting many local young artists, including Cheng Hsien-Yu, Liu Yu, Peng Hung-Chih, and Tseng Ching-Chiang, all of whom have begun to emerge internationally.

In May, we went to Taipei and spent two packed days following Grace through the life of an architect, collector, and arts patron, talking about her close bond with art and the meaning it has given her life. What follows is her account. As told to: Grace Cheung. Grace speaking to Yi Tiao Art. I was born in Malaysia, and later went to Canada for school. After graduating, I lived and worked in New York, the Netherlands, and Hong Kong, China.

Later, I was assigned to Taipei for an architectural project, met my husband, settled here, and started my own practice. I moved into this building more than eight years ago. I loved art from childhood. I was always drawing; I even used mud to build little houses for ants, or took a cookie tin and started constructing houses with it, cutting paper nonstop until the floor was covered with scraps. The nanny who helped look after us could not resist complaining to my mother.

Grace at XRANGE, the architectural firm she founded. Image source: Studio 11. Architectural models large and small at XRANGE. Projects displayed on XRANGE’s official Web site. So I have always felt that architecture, in some unseen way, “chose” me. Before my freshman year in Canada, I found a book on architecture in the school library, and when I opened it I felt as if I had been struck by lightning.

Because I loved art and was also deeply interested in math and science, it was only when I saw that book that I realized there was a field called architecture, one that brought together everything I loved. I felt at once that this was what I would do with my life. An exhibition by Tomás Saraceno at the Red Brick Art Museum. Of course, my profession has inevitably shaped my sense of beauty. In the first years of architecture school, we took art-history courses, and in my own creative work I came to understand what kinds of presentation and aesthetics are especially powerful.

I look at art through an architect’s eyes as well. I am quite fond of Tomás Saraceno, for example; he also comes from an architectural background, and his thinking is wildly imaginative. He takes spider silk as inspiration and structures it with a very architectural way of thinking. The space may resemble a balloon, or simply a mesh of nets and lines; he is not limited by medium. Michael Wolf, Architecture of Density #76, 2006. I like to keep works that are deeply connected to me nearby, where I can see them all the time.

I worked in Hong Kong for five or six years, and after I left I always wanted something that would hold the memory of that period of my life. This photograph moved me immediately, because when I was in Hong Kong I really did live in buildings like honeycombs. An artist could use such a startling form to draw out that feeling in me, so that I could always remember the struggles of my younger working life. I even went to his studio in an industrial district of Hong Kong to talk with him, bought his catalogue, and traveled in the wake of his way of thinking. I gained a great deal from it.

A few years later, I heard that he had died, and looking back, I really treasure that experience. Grace’s office is hung with many works related to mountains; from top to bottom they are Saenkom Chansrinual, Grand Mountain V; Park Seung Mo, Maya925-b, 2015; and Chen Ming-Te, Dakengkeng, 2022. You will notice that I have many mountain-related works, because Chinese people like to place a mountain behind their desk, as if to give themselves something solid to lean on.

The photographic work behind Grace’s desk is one she “made” herself. This piece is actually my own work: it is a real mountain on Mars. I thought that if I was going to have a mountain, I might as well think farther. So I bought this image from NASA’s data archive in the United States, had it framed, and hung it here. A graffiti work in Grace’s office. I have never looked at art from the standpoint of “I want to collect”; I think instead, How wonderful it would be to have this in the spaces where I live.

I also do not buy art because someone is famous, or as an investment. I bought this graffiti work of letters, for instance, at the same time I bought my first Banksy. It has been with me for 18 years. It is Ben Eine’s Alphabet Street, and he has since become a very famous graffiti artist, though at the time he was still little known.

Chang TingTong, Flower, Bird and Cosmos Point, 2021. Arofish, Eject And Survive. If I buy many works only to put them in an art warehouse, that has no meaning for me. Art, I feel, is intimately bound up with human emotion.

Every impulse I have ever had to buy a work begins with whether it provokes a strong reaction in me when I see it. That reaction may come from a past experience or an old memory; as long as something in it stirs my feelings, I will love it and want to keep it close. Lee Kuo-Min, from left to right: Ten Directions Before the Eyes, One Thought in Ten Thousand Years, As Light, Thirty-Three Passages. So in that sense I am unlike many collectors: sometimes I may genuinely admire a work, but my relationship to it may stop at admiration. I do not necessarily need to buy it and bring it home.

At Taipei Dangdai this time, for example, I saw Leandro Erlich’s The Cloud-Uva and thought it was very special; I admired it a great deal. You know perfectly well how it is made and what the principle is, but in the moment you see it, you are still willing to believe the cloud is real. Grace visiting a contemporary-art exhibition at the Liang Shih-Chiu Residence. In all these years of collecting, there has been only one experience I remember as making me genuinely nervous.

I had bought a work from a gallery, paid for it, and then waited a very long time without receiving it. By the end I had started to worry that I had been cheated. Of course, I did eventually get the work, and I learned quite a few lessons from it. I think buying art really is a matter of fate. It is like finding a place to live: whether you are buying a home or renting one, very often it comes down to fate. I think I have rather good fortune with art. When I first arrived in Taipei, I literally met an artist on the street, and later we became close friends.

The landscape, corridors, and land art within the Railway Park were designed by Grace’s architectural firm over the course of 10 years, from the initial proposal to the completion of reconstruction and restoration. Image source: Studio 11. I have been an architect for more than 20 years, and sometimes a single project takes an extraordinarily long time and consumes a tremendous amount of energy. The Railway Park restoration and reconstruction project, for instance, took us a full 10 years, because it is a place with a history of more than 100 years, and there have been too many changes within it.

During the Qing dynasty, trains really did depart from here, but because the site is so old, much of the historical record is blurred and fragmentary. So the question of how, in the end, we could tell the historical story of this place became both fascinating and very challenging. Grace at work in her office. Whenever work becomes that complex, art is, for me, a kind of escape, a kind of release. That is why our foundation especially supports young artists: so that after I leave the office, I can still be surrounded by art and keep creating in another form.

Below is the “mosquito painting” that the artist Chang TingTong gave to Grace. In a sense, I do not think I like “pretty art.” If all you want is something pretty, you can just look at flowers. So the artists we support are all very avant-garde, very experimental. The mosquito painting in the office, for example, was given to me by Chang TingTong as a memento after he completed an art project that used the life and death of mosquitoes to discuss questions of life.

One artist I am especially fond of is Cheng Hsien-Yu; he is an expert and extraordinarily skilled at writing code. Cheng Hsien-Yu, Credit Makes You Free, 2024, Hong Foundation Space, Taipei Dangdai. When Taipei Dangdai told us they had a space for our foundation, he was the first person I thought of. In this new work, when viewers swipe their credit cards, the machine reads their actual spending records from the card.

If that information fell into the wrong hands, it would be disastrous; your card could be used immediately for fraudulent charges. Of course, we destroyed all the data. The work seems humorous, but in fact it highlights our dependence on technology and consumption, which makes it particularly fitting for an art fair. Grace demonstrating Cheng Hsien-Yu’s work Discharge What You Charged, 2019. With this piece, once you plug in your phone, the box closes around it, and the screen above randomly pulls a video from a video-sharing site. You have to watch the entire thing before you can get your phone back.

At the exhibition, you see every participant turn anxious and unsure what to do, because you have no idea how long the video will be. Contemporary people have lost the ability to bear the restless agitation that comes with being separated from their phones. I am drawn to work like that, work that can make people think through the experience it creates. Grace with the artist Cheng Hsien-Yu in his studio. When I support these young artists, I often go to their studios to talk with them and look at the progress of their work.

Sometimes the process feels extraordinary: the work you see at the beginning may be utterly unlike what appears in the final exhibition. A solo project by the Hong Foundation-supported artist Peng Hung-Chih, Money-Grabbing Project, 2004. Image source: MOCA TAIPEI. The blue painting in the lead image is also by Peng Hung-Chih. I enjoy this process very much. I think I maintain very good relationships with the artists. Before a work has fully taken shape, I may offer some suggestions or comments, telling them what I, as an ordinary viewer, would want to understand, or discussing other possibilities, but I never interfere with their creation.

Grace’s “Ant House,” which she designed, is the only building in Taiwan selected for Phaidon’s World Atlas of 21st Century Architecture. I think art also affects the next generation in subtle ways. My daughter is in elementary school now, and when she invites friends to the house, she introduces the works to them. Pointing to that Banksy, for example, she tells her friends, “Did you know? No one knows who this artist is, and no one knows what he looks like.”

I stand there feeling both gratified and amused, because I have never deliberately tried to teach her anything about art, and yet, little by little, she seems to have absorbed some of it. Grace among works she has collected in the Railway Park. Collecting is, in the end, an intensely private matter. As I see it, having good work near you can spark thoughts, imagination, and curiosity; it lets me remember, always, that there is a stance there.