Another sponsor of the Kiefer exhibition is the Baijia Cultural Investment Group, which belongs to the property magnate Yan Lugen, one of Artnews’s top Asian collectors. He has invested millions in art, founding and sponsoring the Nanjing International Art Festival. He is expected to invest millions of dollars in a new Nanjing Biennale, scheduled for October 2018. Yan also has his own museum, the Baijia Lake Museum, in Nanjing; “I have already bought and collected more than 3,000 works of Picasso, Monet, Van Gogh, Rodin, Matisse, Delvaux, Dalí, Renoir, Chagall, Derain, Henri Martin, Degas and Utrillo,” he tells The Art Newspaper.
He has established a series of ART100 galleries in spaces in New York, Hong Kong, Singapore, Beijing and Nanjing and will open further outlets in London and Paris this year. None of the works in the Kiefer show were for sale, he says; it is a “not-for-profit exhibition and I do not own them”.
