Artistic icon
Biography charts rise of legendary Chinese antiquities dealer Robert Chang
The streets of Hong Kong in 1948 witnessed an influx of people from the mainland who were escaping the chaos of the Chinese civil war. Among them was Robert Chang, a Shanghai native in his 20s who arrived with just a suitcase and $24 in his pocket.
He survived on two meals a day. Sometimes when he couldn’t afford lodgings, he spent the night on the streets, sleeping on used newspapers. He spoke no Cantonese and had poor English and found it difficult to find a job. He saw a bleak future ahead of him.
But today, in the world of Chinese art collection, Robert Chang is considered a legendary figure. The 90-year-old has been a leading art dealer and collector of Chinese antiquities for decades. His collections have sold for tens of millions of dollars at auction.
He helped introduce art auctions to Hong Kong and actively promoted the city as a top trading center for Chinese art. He was also one of the main advisers when the Chinese mainland adopted auctioning, and he made bids at many of the first art auctions on the mainland.
Chang’s life is all about how a middle-school dropout who sought refuge on the streets of Hong Kong became an icon of the Chinese art world. And a new book narrates all the dramatic scenarios in his life you might want to know about.
Robert Chang: Life of Collection, recently published by Beijing’s Guardian Art Center and written by Li Changwei, a freelance writer, is more than a biographical review of Chang’s personal achievements. It is a personal account of the history and his experiences of the Chinese art-collection industry in the 20th century.
“It’s my first book,” Chang said when he visited Beijing last month to promote the title.
“But I never consider myself a great person. I’m just someone who runs a small business.”
That was why he declined the idea of the book more than 10 years ago, when it was put forward by Kou Qin, one of the mainland’s earliest auctioneers and general manger of the Guardian Art Center.
“It’s not a book filled with laudatory expressions,” Kou says.
“It’s a collection of lively anecdotes and precious life lessons about genuine connoisseurship, built upon wisdom, hardships and credibility, which still matters a lot to the art world today.”
The son of a well-off antiques store owner, Chang’s recollections of his childhood and early years reflect how antique dealers in Shanghai profited from a booming market from the late 1920s to the 1930s.
The period saw an important transition: declining aristocrats and court officials of the overturned Qing Dynasty (1644-1911), who favored classical Chinese paintings and calligraphy, gradually lost their predominance in art collection to a growing group of wealthy bankers. Chang says the latter group preferred imperial ceramics crafted at official kilns to paintings.
The rising demand also generated a rise of influential antique dealers, several of whom became business acquaintances of Chang’s family, such as Qiu Yanzhi.
The prosperous art market of Shanghai was then gradually replaced by Hong Kong, as many rich people moved there in the 1940s, and the city developed into the financial center of Asia. The chapters of Chang’s life after arriving in Hong Kong are an inspirational story typical to many people arriving in Hong Kong forced to start their careers from scratch.
Chang worked as antiques dealer with the support of his family’s long-standing clients who had relocated to Hong Kong and abroad. He ran five antiques and curiosity stores at one time.
He first attended an auction in London in the late 1960s, and was impressed by the openness, convenience and inclusiveness of auctions. He began to bid at auctions in Europe and the United States.
And he felt the model should be introduced into Hong Kong, anticipating a time where art auctions would become a major stakeholder in the art market. When Sotheby’s staged its first auctions in Hong Kong in the 1970s, he consigned his collections and actively made bids. He also introduced his clients to the auction house.
He shared his knowledge and contacts in auctioning, when the Chinese mainland also considered adopting the model. He was present at the first art auctions held in Shanghai and Beijing in the early 1990s.
Over the past two decades, Chang has been a regular bidder in mainland salesrooms. And he is always easy to spot: He always sits in the front row, wearing a colored suit and a Panama hat. His fashion style reminds people of the laokele, a word in the Shanghai dialect for “old clerk”, which refers to people who dress in the neat, stylish manner of the 1920s and ’30s.
But the people whom he competes with in the bidding race have changed dramatically. There are now an increasing number of deep-pocketed, homegrown entrepreneurs-turned-collectors who are active players in the market.
“There are so many rich people these days,” Chang says. “They no longer go to the salesroom but bid on the phone or online.
“It’s very difficult for dealers to buy something good at a relatively low price.”
He says he never imagined that the art market in China would grow into the big, extensive network it is today. “Objects that could fetch tens of millions used to be rare, but now, the price often exceeds the 100 million yuan threshold.
“I want to see how the market (for Chinese art) will evolve. There will be even greater changes over the next 50 years.”
But however the times may have changed, Chang believes a true collector always pursues items that are genuine, topnotch and well-preserved.
“I tell people to buy nothing but antiques. You think of them from time to time. You take them out and appreciate them, and that makes you joyful.”
When Chang was in Beijing for the promotional event, he was asked by an audience member about what he dreams about accomplishing at his age.
“My dream? To name all the museums in the world after me!” jokes Chang.
A self-taught connoisseur, Chang says his best teacher had been museums, which taught him what museumquality objects should look like. He made two donations from his collections to the Suzhou Museum in the 1990s.
“I will leave my collection to the public,” he says. “That is, to the museums and galleries.”
I never consider myself a great person. I’m just someone who runs a small business.” Robert Chang, art collector