With the intense international speculation in contemporary Chinese art over the past decade, one might think that all the great works would have landed on foreign shores. But the Beijing-based collector Guan Yi has been working to make sure that never happens. “I hope to leave for China a complete history of contemporary Chinese art,” he says, adding, “the importance of Chinese art is just like the role played by the Chinese economy: Both are impossible to ignore.”

And so is Guan. Heir to a chemical-manufacturing fortune and still in his early 40s, he has emerged as one of the most prominent mainland buyers of his native art, with a collection of some 700 to 800 works. And he selected them himself, without advisers or curators, the better to hone his very individual aesthetic. Although his holdings cover the past 30 years and include works by Yang Fudong, Zheng Guogu, Cao Fei and Qiu Anxiong, Guan hasn’t fully given in to the fad for Chinese painting. Fully one-third of his acquisitions have been large-scale installations by such talents as Huang Yong Ping, and he has a penchant for pieces by experimental collectives like Gu Dexin’s conceptual New Analysts, who favored charts and graphs. He currently keeps his trove in a large warehouse in Song Zhuang, an artist-friendly area in Beijing’s eastern suburbs.

But Guan was running out of space to show all the works he was amassing. He made headlines earlier this year with his plans to open a new museum and sculpture park in the capital city’s Beigao district. He hasn’t provided a time line, but he has discussed the project’s inspiration—Dia: Beacon, the vast former factory in New York’s Hudson River Valley that houses the Dia Foundation’s collection of mainly post-1960 art. Guan says his goal is to “bring art and architecture together” and to provide “a site for international and local artists to work together.” He is outspoken about the need to present contemporary pieces to the public and has criticized the increasingly investment-oriented nature of the market for contemporary Chinese works. “Capital has broken through the boundaries of countries, politics, race and culture,” he says. “ It has given rise to around 100 to 150 global art superstars, [but] it is impossible to tell if these are genuinely the most important artists of history.”

Guan’s visual sense may be related to his background as a photographer and to the fact that during his younger days, he witnessed a critical stage in his country’s cultural development. “The years from 1984 to 1989 are the real cornerstone of the awakening of Chinese contemporary art,” he says, noting that works from that time are the core of his collection. “I cherish the memory of that period.”

"Guan Yi" originally appeared in the December 2008 issue of Art+Auction. For a complete list of articles from this issue available on ARTINFO, see Art+Auction's December 2008 Table of Contents.