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Was modigliani beaten to death

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Power 100

Most influential people in 2019 in the contemporary artworld

79

Collector - Patrons taking their collection public through the two Long Museums in Shanghai

79 in 2019

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Celebrated for his lavish spending on artworks (most famously the $170.4 million for Modigliani’s 1917–18 Nu Couché), billionaire collector Liu Yiqian was opening up about the other costs of his fetish for cultural artefacts in Kejia Wu’s art market report on China, commissioned for TEFAF. Liu put the annual loss at the West Bund outpost of his Long Museum (one of two in Shanghai, curated by his wife Wang Wei) at a cool $6m. Relatively nothing then. The private museum continues to display works from the couple’s extensive holdings – numbering over 2,000 works – of traditional and contemporary Chinese and international art. Notably this year, the Long Museum hosted a first Chinese institutional show for American superstar Mark Bradford, whose exhibition Los Angeles went down a st

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Liu Yiqian

Chinese billionaire investor

In this Chinese name, the family name is Liu.

Liu Yiqian (Chinese: 刘益谦; pinyin: Liú Yìqiān, pronounced [ljǒʊ îtɕʰjɛ́n], born 1963) is a Chinese billionaire investor and art collector. An autodidact who formerly worked as a taxi driver, he has built his fortune since the mid-1980s by investing in stock trading, real estate[2] and pharmaceuticals.[1]

Biography

Born in 1963 into a working-class family in Shanghai, Liu Yiqian dropped out of school at the age of 14, in order to help his mother to sell handbags on the street. Then he became a taxi driver in Shanghai for two years in the mid-1980s, before making his fortune in the 1990s as part of the new rich who emerged after China's reform and opening-up policy. He bought shares, paying around 160 yuan ($30) a share, of a Chinese company which became one of the first to list on the stock exchange as China began developing its capital markets. As a consequence, in just two years, the share price jumped to over 10,000 yuan. Liu

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Liu Yiqian’s museums house the largest private art collection in the country.Illustration by Jun Cen

“It’s nice to come home to Shanghai,” the Chinese billionaire Liu Yiqian told me one day in February, four months after gaining worldwide notoriety by spending a hundred and seventy million dollars on a painting by Amedeo Modigliani. We had just sat down in his office at the Long Museum West, one of two privately run art museums that he has opened in the city, when his face contorted and a sneeze of atomic force burst out, unhindered by tissue or hand. Liu unself-consciously wiped himself down with a Kleenex, cleared his sinuses copiously, and balled up the tissue, placing it on a glass coffee table between us. Then he returned to the subject of his home town: “It might not have a long history, this city, but it is a place made by immigrants, for immigrants. We are exposed to so much from everywhere that people here have to adapt.”

Liu’s office is modest. Cold winter light entered through a window that looked onto a shabby courtyard. The room was sparsely decorated, and the m

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