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How Two Hong Kong Collectors Are Choosing Public Engagement Over Possession

With the recent launch of Cheng-Lan's Corner, Brian Yue and Claire Bi created a platform for artists from the global majority—and for the community around them.

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.

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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........

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