This is a typical Edouard Malingue gesture: when his interviewer leaps spontaneously to her feet to examine some detail in his gallery, he immediately stands up, too, and he doesn't sit down again until she does. He's politeness personified. He's an art dealer and that means he's essentially a salesman, but he's as unassuming an individual as you could wish to meet - no bling, no bluster. He's also patient, which should stand him in good stead as he tries to influence artistic taste in Hong Kong.
Malingue, who is French, opened his eponymous gallery last autumn. It's a lovely space, deliberately designed - by OMA, the firm run by Dutch architect Rem Koolhaas - to invoke a museum. The idea is that people who may never have entered a gallery in their lives can come and see first-class work in an ideal setting.
'I wanted to have a space that shows commitment to very high-quality Western art in a way that hadn't been done yet in Hong Kong,' he says. 'Rem Koolhaas came, asked many questions, and [his firm] started working on it that same day.'
September's opening show was the largest Picasso exhibition staged by a Hong Kong gallery. It included Study for Two Nudes and Woman With a Hat, both being exhibited in Asia for the first time. After Hong Kong, the exhibition went to Taiwan and Singapore.
In April, Malingue mounted a show, entitled Impressionism to Modern Art, which included such artists as Pissarro, Utrillo, Chagall and Magritte. In both cases, he produced high-end catalogues. 'I do those because I want people to recognise quality,' he says. 'I offer great works they can have access to rather than secondary works that have made it out to Hong Kong because they can't be sold in Europe.'
European art of the 19th and 20th centuries is a speciality of the Malingue family. Malingue's grandfather, Maurice, was a critic with a particular interest in the Pont-Aven school - a commune of artists that worked in Brittany, in northwest France, from the 1850s and included painter Paul Gauguin.