David Chau: in Deﬁance of Conventions

Julie Chun David Chau: In Defiance of Conventions n just the past year, a formerly David Chau, President of Cc Foundation, Shanghai. Photo: unnoticed group within China’s art Mobe Ban Whu. Icommunity has achieved meteoric attention and media coverage. They are not artists or curators or even high profile museum directors. They are the new faction of a young (thirty-five and under) and affluently divested “artrepreneur,” a term applied to differentiate them from the older generation of discreet art collectors and to highlight the effects of their dramatic buying power for purchasing art in bulk.1 It’s almost impossible for these handful numbers of men to escape anyone’s attention as fodders for online and WeChat attention. They include the founders Adrian Cheng of chi K11 art museums in Hong Kong and mainland China, Lu Xun of Sifeng Art Museum in Nanjing, Lin Han of M Woods Museum in Beijing, and Chong Zhou of the Shanghai restaurant Le Petit Cochon Vert. They have been educated abroad and command full confidence to grant interviews in Mandarin and perfect English. They also possess a no-nonsense ability to put down significant sums of money with relative ease where no older collectors had usually dared. David Chau belongs to this category of China’s new artrepreneurs. Helming disparate businesses such as a fleet company and modeling agency as well as diverse contemporary art projects, David Chau is widely known for his support of Shanghai’s galleries and launching the annual Art 021 Shanghai Contemporary Art Fair (begun 2013). His Cc Foundation is the sponsor of the 2016 Yishu Awards for writing and curating on contemporary Chinese art. Julie Chun: I’ve read a few interviews and accounts about you that are available on the Internet and I found that it seems there is only one legitimate interview you had given, which itself was quite short. And all other articles were just citing or making references to that interview. So can you please tell me a little bit about yourself? David Chau: Yes, there are several accounts about me online where the facts and numbers are completely wrong. To begin, I was born in Shanghai but my parents went to Hong Kong after I was born. Before I was five years old, my grandparents on my mother’s side raised me. Then I moved to Hong Kong for about a year and lived with my aunt because my parents had 54 moved back to Shanghai. In Hong Kong, I attended preschool and began grade 1, and then I came back to Shanghai and attended a local school to complete grades 1 and 2 and then transferred to an international school in grade 3 and 4. In 1995, our family moved to Vancouver, Canada. Julie Chun: Why Canada? David Chau: Canada was a popular destination for Hong Kong ID and passport holders. At about that time there was the looming issue of Hong Kong being transferred back to mainland China, slated for 1997. So prior to the hand-over, many Hong Kong, Taiwanese, and Cantonese people moved to Canada. My parents couldn’t manage to stay in Vancouver because to them it was too boring, so they came back to Asia after a couple of months with my younger brother and sister who at the time were significantly younger than me. I lived with my aunt in Vancouver through grades 5 and 6, and when I was just beginning grade 7, my parents wanted me to move back to Hong Kong to be with them. So I went to Hong Kong for another two years before I found my way back to Canada to attend boarding school. Julie Chun: So you missed Canada? David Chau: Yes, when I was much younger. Mostly because I had good memories of living in Vancouver and perhaps I wanted to go back to Canada because I wasn’t used to living with my parents. For most of my early childhood, I never really lived with my parents for more than about two years at one time. Julie Chun: As you are recounting your childhood to me, the one obvious factor that emerges is that you must have had to mature quite early being displaced from your parents. David Chau: I did. I had to move schools almost every two years, and I was traveling alone on an airplane since six years old. I’m used to being by myself. Because I moved around so much, I didn’t have stable sets of friends. I was good at making friends, but never really good ones. I adjust very well to different environments and am usually the guy that everyone likes. But I’m never able to open up myself to anybody, because that’s just the way I grew up, I guess. Maybe I don’t want myself to get too attached to people. That was why I usually surrounded myself with stuff that I liked and I had to find a lot of stuff that interested me. I like to read. I love stories— histories and novels. When I was much younger, I also read a lot of action and mystery stories. I collected first edition books of mysteries, novels, science fiction, and even comic books. I’m an expert in superhero comics. The movies have made them big but I’m really the expert on all things superhero. I amassed quite a collection of comic books and sports cards as a kid. I was attached to things and that became my hobby—collecting the things that I loved. Then I realized that it was only a matter of time before these books accrued in value. Some first edition books went from about one hundred dollars to three thousand dollars in one year. Julie Chun: Did your parents spoil you with material goods because you lived far away from them? 55 David Chau: No. My parents never spoilt me. I had to make my own money. I received my first stamps from my grandparents when I was five or six. Back in the early 1990s, stamp trading was the first market that opened up in China and not the stock market. Even Liu Yiqian [founder of the Long Museum in Shanghai] started off making money with stamp trading. He was a taxi driver and then he was a stamp trader. I believe everything is connected once you get into something. Collecting is something that is not just innate. It’s a process of collecting one thing and then moving into something else. Which is why I don’t believe art collecting happens overnight. If you have never collected anything, you cannot start collecting art and be really successful at it. Collecting and business became my two main interests in life from early on. I became interested in sports cards when I moved to Canada because basketball and hockey and the sports culture are a big part of life there. When I moved to Hong Kong to attend international school, I realized there were many kids who also collected sports cards. I sold sports cards to the local boys in Hong Kong who had way more money than the kids in Canada. I was able to do a brisk business with my classmates. I was even featured in the newspaper when I was twelve for sports card trading and making good money from it. Julie Chun: So what did you do with the money you earned as a youth? David Chau: I took the money and invested more. As I mentioned, I like to read. I read a lot of business books early on. I read Rich Dad Poor Dad [by Robert T. Kiyosaki], which was a fairly easy book for an eleven-year old kid to read. Despite what people say about the book, it’s a good primer for business and investment. Write ups say I made my early wealth selling sports cards on eBay, but we didn’t have the Internet in the 1995–96. I made a lot of money trading sports cards before eBay by going to card trade shows. In fact, it wasn’t until 1997 that I was on eBay selling sports cards. I tell people I am not an Internet start up entrepreneur but I was the first Internet entrepreneur. Even to this day, I still believe the Internet is part of the business but it’s all about what you do as a business in using the Internet as a tool for achieving those business goals. Julie Chun: Even from a young age, the idea that one can liquidate an object into a financial asset seemed to have excited you. David Chau: Yes, that excites me a lot, tremendously. I’m a pragmatic person. I have to admit the money part of what I collect really excites me. I admit I’m not a successful dealer, which is why I’m not an art dealer nor am I a book dealer. Nor do I take my money out of collectibles because I’m a bad investor. I can never part with the stuff that I really like at the right moment. Julie Chun: Do you play the stock market? 56 David Chau: Actually, I don’t. I’m not a trader. The profit excites me but everything I learned about myself through all my early experiences, I realized I am not a totally speculative person. But, at the same time, I’m not the kind of person who wants to be a museum collector. I’m kind of in-between because I cannot part with the art that I love.

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