A new generation of art patrons and collectors in Hong Kong is not only willing to support the city’s art ecosystem’s expansion but want to actively shape it. They are, in many cases, even deliberately distancing themselves from more traditional scripts of art patronage to embrace alternative participatory models anchored in community. One of the patronage platforms engaging directly with Hong Kong’s art scene, the Cheng-Lan Foundation, opened its first physical space during Art Basel Hong Kong: Cheng-Lan’s Corner, a ground-floor gallery at 3 Prince’s Terrace in Hong Kong’s Mid-Levels, just steps from the Tai Kwun cultural complex. Behind it are two art patrons in their 30s, Brian Yue and Claire Bi, who founded Cheng-Lan in 2023 with the aim of operating at the intersection of private collecting and public engagement, supporting artists from the global majority and diaspora communities.
Yue traces the foundation’s ethos back to both his and Bi’s educational and professional backgrounds. The couple literally met during an edition of Art Basel—”art has always been a great connector for us,” he told Observer. Bi’s parents were art lovers. She studied filmmaking, and that is how she began to understand art as a way to express oneself. “I always felt that art should be accessible to the community, to everyone around us, not only within the art world. That’s the way I started to explore art,” she said. Nine years ago, Bi founded a secondary boarding school where art is woven into every discipline—from design and technology to social science and public policy—rather than treated as a subject apart.
Yue, meanwhile, grew up in a household heavily influenced by his grandfather, a classical Chinese teacher whose bedtime stories drew on great works of Chinese art and literature. “There was a deep reverence for history and for what came before,” he recalled. Yue went on to study architecture and spent his university years embedded in a community of artists and creatives in London, later working for a firm focused on public-facing cultural projects—museums, galleries and cultural strategy. He subsequently pursued a second master’s in art history, partly to deepen his understanding of the issues he was encountering at work, particularly as the firm was developing exhibitions dealing with race, colonialism, imperialism and slavery. “These are difficult subjects without the knowledge to unpack them properly,” he acknowledged, adding that it was valuable to engage with them academically while applying that knowledge in practice. He felt a genuine responsibility toward the public—something he still feels today with the opening of the Cheng-Lan Foundation space. “Everything we do, we think about who we’re speaking to and what our responsibility is in that.”
This attitude shapes the art Yue and Bi collect and the program at Cheng-Lan’s Corner; in both cases, they prioritize artists whose practices work through and engage with the complex tapestry of human history. “There’s a conversation that’s integral to everything we do,” Yue explained, sharing how, on the way to the interview, he and Bi went through the list of artists in their collection and asked themselves several questions. Is it the biography that represents something important for the conversation? Is it the practice itself? Is it the message, or the voices the artist speaks for? “It’s a combination. It’s a reflection of all of us,” Bi added, acknowledging how Maria Chitu, an art advisor and cultural strategist who joined the conversation, has played an integral role in helping shape their vision into a program.
The inaugural show by Filipino artist Cian Dayrit, “A Country, a Body,” exemplifies this vision and direction. Drawing on archival research and collaborations with rural and Indigenous communities, Dayrit’s latest body of work explores the country’s legacies of colonialism, land extraction and the transfer of power. Through a series of tapestries, paintings and sculptural works incorporating an articulated mix of historical maps, military iconography, botanical imagery and vernacular materials, he engages in a both anthropological and sociological analysis at the intersection of art, geopolitics and history, unearthing legacies of colonial displacement, labor and resistance while opening imaginative spaces to rethink our relationship to land and systems of power.
Bi and Yue decided to focus on the global majority as a core part of their identity and as a framework for how they engage with today’s globalized world. “We’re both from China; he grew up in Hong Kong, I studied in the U.S., he studied in the U.K., and now we’re both back. That sense of being between worlds is very present,” Bi said. Their experience of navigating between cultures is inseparable from the kind of platform they want to build: one that can facilitate intercultural dialogue and creative exchange rather than reinforce divisions.
Cheng-Lan’s Corner will host solo presentations, commissioned shows and group exhibitions drawn from the foundation’s permanent collection. Programming will be co-produced with the artists and built around the specific contexts in which they work. The ambition, Yue added, is for the space to host a constellation of voices rather than be a platform for any single one.
Bi and Yue see having a smaller organization without the backing of a large conglomerate not as a limitation but as an opportunity. They’re able to be responsive—to the people they meet, to initiatives worth supporting—in ways that a more rigid institutional structure would not permit. Conceived to operate at the intersection of private collecting and public engagement, Cheng-Lan’s Corner was designed to be not only an addition to the neighborhood but an integral part of its cultural fabric, embedded through a dense public program capable of engaging with its diverse communities and their different needs. The inaugural show is already an example: Dayrit’s central concerns around labor and migration are shaping a program of workshops directed at the Filipino community, scheduled on their days off, in a city where finding accessible space remains a persistent challenge.
You’ll find Cheng-Lan’s Corner on a residential street behind a main thoroughfare, intersected by Caine Road—a street that once served as a historical demarcation line between where foreign and Chinese populations were permitted to live. “We’re very aware of the cultural context we’re embedded in,” Yue emphasized, pointing out the mosque up the hill and the Baptist church down the street. The couple was acutely aware of the cultural layering of this location and chose it deliberately.
Investment in and engagement with community has been central to Bi and Yue’s approach to collecting and, by extension, to their conception of the foundation’s role. They’re part of a generation that doesn’t want merely to own; they want to be involved in the culture, to know the artist, following their path actively and building a collection with the potential to have a long-term impact. “We’re actively trying to think beyond the physical space, and we’ve realized that support and platforming are really the software of everything,” Bi reflected. Even before finding the physical space, they initiated a residency fellowship in collaboration with the Delfina Foundation in London and Para Site in Hong Kong called The Harbor Exchange Fellowship Program.
The logic was straightforward: bring together two strong initiatives to create something greater than the sum of its parts instead of trying to build from scratch. “They each have the resources, expertise and dedicated teams to do it properly,” Bi said of the program, which installs a Hong Kong-based creative in a residency at the Delfina Foundation in London, while a U.K.-based creative comes to Para Site in Hong Kong. “We’re very keen to create these kinds of exchanges, and that reflects in our broader programming,” Yue added. “We want to promote the local and wider regional ecosystem, but also to have exchanges with international artists.”
The response since the launch has been overwhelmingly positive. Hong Kong’s art scene is characterized by a rare sense of collegiality and collaboration compared to the more territorial and fragmented ecosystems of other major art hubs like New York and London. Practically every major institution sent someone to their opening, and those encounters have translated into genuine goodwill and ongoing relationships. Yue attributes this in part to the community’s scale: smaller than London or New York, it naturally fosters coordination and personal connections, as people know each other across multiple roles simultaneously.
During the installation, several passersby stopped to ask what was happening. Then a child from a nearby primary school pulled his mother inside, asking, “What is this?” As she was telling him to leave, Yue invited them both in. Those moments clarified what they want Cheng-Lan’s Corner to be: a door that’s always open, a third space in a neighborhood that doesn’t have enough of them and a place that genuinely belongs to everyone. Bi and Yue spoke of a broader excitement in Hong Kong, with new initiatives like theirs emerging at the same time and bringing fresh energy to the city’s expanding creative ecosystems. “The more initiatives there are, the better that ecosystem becomes. Especially with this generation, people are more keen to build community and to build together.”
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