This past May, the first edition of the Hong Kong International Art Fair brought in some 19,000 visitors and about $20 million for its 101 exhibitors. Not bad for a first run. Many market observers were quick to attribute the fair’s success to Hong Kong’s almost total lack of tax on art sales—but not so fast. The steam engines driving this event are its two tireless directors, Magnus Renfrew and Stephanie Dieckvoss.

In 2007 the British-born Renfrew, who caught the art bug at a young age from his archaeologist father, moved to Hong Kong from Shanghai, where he had spent the previous year working for the peripatetic art-and-design dealer Pearl Lam at her Contrasts Gallery. In performing that job, he visited China’s major cities and met both young and established Chinese artists. “I started to understand not just the art scene but the people,” Renfrew says. Before his stint with Lam, he’d been a specialist at Bonhams in London, where in June 2006 he assembled the auction house’s first sale of contemporary Asian art.

Renfrew has found his perfect complement in the German-born Dieckvoss, who brings to the partnership three years of experience as manager of London’s Frieze Art Fair. “Marcus didn’t have fair-management experience,” she says. “I make sure shipments arrive, run the vip program, structure events and basically take care of all these tiny details that are crucial.”

Perhaps the directors’ most impressive achievement is how quickly they put the event together. Renfrew started recruiting galleries only in early June 2007. He vaunts as his greatest success keeping dealers happy enough to want to return. He says that 90 percent of the dealers who responded to a postfair questionnaire reported that they had met new clients, who were the source of 60 percent of all sales.

While Renfrew looks after galleries from the Asia Pacific region, Dieckvoss, who worked for Gagosian in New York and for Paris’s Karsten Greve gallery before going to Frieze, handles those from the U.S., Europe and South America. Next year, she wants to bring more Western dealers to the fair, which will double its floor space to accommodate larger booths. “We proved that we could do what we set out to do,” she says. “Out of nothing, we created an event that shows that Hong Kong will be an international fair destination and will develop into a cultural hub for Asia.”

"Magnus Renfrew+Stephanie Dieckvoss" 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.