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Meet the Collector: Why Evan Chow Doesn’t Believe in the Coup de Foudre

The Hong Kong–based collector reflects on discipline, ways of seeing and building a collection that evolves organically.

In many ways, Evan Chow is representative of a new generation of Asian collectors reimagining what dynastic art collecting looks like in the 21st Century. A managing partner of MCL Financial Group and a descendant of the Lee family that founded the Bank of East Asia, he established and runs the family office, CEG Capital, alongside his wider financial interests. He is the first Hong Kong-based trustee appointed to the Board at the New Museum in New York, a member of the Cercle International of the Pompidou and a founding patron of M Museum—an institutional footprint that reflects a collector who has long understood that patronage and acquisition are two sides of the same coin. His growing collection of over 500 works is both international in breadth and focused in scope, with particular attention paid to geometric abstraction and emerging and mid-career artists from Hong Kong. In 2023, he founded the Evan Chow Art Prize at the Chinese University of Hong Kong, supporting a range of works across undergraduate and postgraduate exhibitions.

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The institutional weight of Chow’s collecting life is, in many ways, a product of his disbelief in the coup de foudre—the sudden epiphany that inspires or shapes a collection. His collecting journey did not begin with some decisive first purchase; it evolved as he lived with artworks. They “begin to shape the way you see,” Chow tells Observer. His first purchase was a print from Zhang Xiaogang’s seminal Bloodline series, acquired after spending time at ArtHK, the art fair that later became Art Basel Hong Kong. “I remember the experience more than the acquisition itself. It marked a growing curiosity rather than a defining moment.”

What drew him in was a desire to understand how certain works maintain structure and clarity. “I was interested in how an artwork could change the way a room feels, not by dominating it, but by bringing a sense of proportion and balance into it,” he reflects. Even after years and so much art encountered in between, that hasn’t really........

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