Budi Tek

SINGAPORE — When the Indonesian-Chinese collector Budi Tek, also known in China as Yu Deyao, bought a 1992 masterpiece by Zhang Xiaogang at a Sotheby’s auction in Hong Kong last autumn, he didn’t intend to decorate an office wall or keep it hidden in a warehouse. Mr. Tek — who paid 52.18 million Hong Kong dollars, or $6.69 million, for “Chapter of a New Century — Birth of the People’s Republic of China II” — plans to showcase the work in a new private museum, the De Museum, that will be under construction later this year and is expected to open in 2013.

Mr. Tek already owns the Yuz Museum, a contemporary art museum in his hometown of Jakarta. The two-and-a half year old institution is open to the general public and is free of charge. It presents exhibitions two to four times a year, drawing on works from Mr. Tek’s collection of more than 1,000 paintings. Currently closed for maintenance, it will reopen in July with a solo exhibition of Ye Yongqing’s works.

Mr. Tek is not alone. Throughout Asia, several private collectors are now sharing their passion for contemporary art by opening private museums, and more are considering following suit.

“In Asia, the private sector plays a very important role in supporting contemporary art, because governments are not really that interested,” said Dr. Oei Hong Djien, one of the most established art collectors in Indonesia and one of the first to set up a private museum in the region. In Indonesia, he added, “there is no real infrastructure, galleries, or fairs to support young artists.”

Dr. Oei opened the OHD Museum of Modern & Contemporary Indonesian Art in Magelang in Central Java in 1997. It is accessible to the general public by appointment, and he estimates that the museum displays only about 10 percent to 15 percent of the 2,000 pieces or so in his collection at any time. “The rest of the pieces are in storage and we rotate,” he explained, adding that he has also lent pieces to national museums in Singapore, South Korea, Japan and the Netherlands.

While Dr. Oei initially collected early works by artists who have now become “masters” of modern art, such as Affandi and Widayat, his collection is now divided fairly evenly between contemporary and modern Indonesian art, as he has found himself in recent years supporting more younger artists.

“I bought Masriadi when it was still $1,000,” he laughs, referring to works by I Nyoman Masriadi, a 38-year-old artist whose paintings are now consistently the most expensive Indonesian contemporary art at auction. One of his works, “The Man From Bantul (The Final Round),” fetched $1 million in 2008 at Sotheby’s Hong Kong.

In Singapore, there are at least three private museums of contemporary Asian art, including Art Retreat, which was opened by the Indonesian collector Kwee Swie Teng and which includes a gallery dedicated to the late Chinese master Wu Guanzhong. In India, the mother-son collector duo Lekha and Anupam Poddar started the Devi Art Foundation in 2008, the country’s first noncommercial, nonprofit space for contemporary art. And early this year, Shiv Nadar, founder of the $5 billion technology company HCL, and his wife, Kiran, opened the Kiran Nadar Museum, which showcases modern and contemporary Indian art from their collection.

Karen Smith, a Beijing-based art critic and curator, notes that in China, few collectors have yet acquired enough quality works to open an interesting private museum. “Added to the fact that taking things to the next level requires really deep pockets, in the present climate most will be weighing up the issue of money spent on funding a museum versus the money that could be spent on art,” she said.

Nonetheless, several Chinese collectors appear ready to make the leap. The Shanghai-based business tycoon and collector Liu Yiqian and the Beijing-based collector Guan Yi are both said to be considering opening their own museums to display their collections.

A big problem facing those private museums in China that do see the light of day is sustainability. The Shanghe Art Museum in Chengdu and Dongyu Art Museum in Shenyang both closed down in the early 2000s after being open only a few years, reportedly due to a lack of sustainable funding.

Funding is not the only impediment to a successful private museum, Ms. Smith says. “It’s about programming, staffing, fixing a focus of activities, and developing and sustaining a meaningful public profile for the museum.”

But this does not deter Mr. Tek as he prepares to open his second museum. He already has a full-time curator for his Jakarta museum and plans to hire another one for the De Museum when it opens in two years. Situated in Shanghai’s Jiading District, the entire project will occupy about four hectares, or 10 acres; with about 8,000 square meters, or 85,000 square feet, of exhibition space available.

“I need a big space because I have several very large installations,” Mr. Tek said. Among his collection is “Bintang House” by Yoshimoto Nara, a wooden hut with windows that allow the viewer to peek inside what looks like an artist’s studio, with many of Mr. Nara’s trademark manga-style drawings on the walls and floor. Mr. Tek also owns one version of Ai Weiwei’s “Zodiac Head/Circle of Animals” sculpture installation, which was first presented at the São Paulo Biennale, where the artist recreated the 12 bronze animal heads that once adorned the Yuanmingyuan fountain in Beijing. (Another version is currently on view in London at Somerset House.)

Not all collectors with a desire to show their works are going the route of exhibiting in a dedicated physical space. The Burger Collection in Hong Kong is a private collection of contemporary art owned by Monique Burger and her husband, Max, which now includes more than 1,000 works. The couple regularly engage in arts patronage — for example, helping sponsor, with the Hong Kong Arts Development Council, the exhibition project of the artist Pak Sheung Chuen for the Venice Biennale in 2009 or regularly lending works to museums around the world — but have decided against building a permanent space at this stage.

“They are more interested in exploring the functions of a private collection in the rapidly changing contemporary art world in the next couple of years,” said Daniel Kuriakovic, the curator of the collection. “A permanent space seemed not the right model.”

The French collector Sylvain Levy, who with his wife, Dominique, founded the DSL Collection of Chinese contemporary art, believes the Internet and the iPad can be interesting alternative art spaces. They recently released an iPad app that offers a “ friendly and innovative way to look at a private collection.”

The principle behind a traveling collection and an app or Web site is the same, Mr. Levy said. “You do not wait for people to come to you, you go where people are.”

【Summing Up】 Art News: Asian Collectors Show Off