Democratic exchange

"I didn't know what globalisation meant in 1999," Sundaram Tagore says one recent afternoon at the Foreign Correspondents' Club, "but I knew something was happening. I saw such a melting pot in New York. Marriage partners were mixed, children were mixed, people speaking languages from every corner of the world. But it wasn't reflected in the art world. I asked why. The art world claims to be so advanced, but really it was quite backwards. There were niche galleries - Indian, Chinese, Russian - but they were never about the confluence of culture. I said, 'We're going to do that'."

So Tagore left his job at the Pace Wildenstein Gallery in New York, and in 2000 opened his own gallery on Greene Street in SoHo, when that area was still a chic bastion of art and culture. "It was a really grand space. A huge ground-level loft with columns, filled with light," he says, smiling. "The idea was to open a gallery, take the resources, and fund a cultural centre to open a dialogue between the marginalised and the establishment. We were having so many events, literally every other day. It was exhausting and we did that for 10 years."

Tagore now runs two galleries in New York, one in Hong Kong and another, newly opened, in Singapore. The galleries share a focus on cultural exchange and an international perspective. "No matter what country I go to, I will never change my format. The format is intercultural dialogue. People have asked me if I change the format for the Chinese market. No, never! I'm not catering to mainland collectors. But if they're interested in an international outlook, they'll come to us."

Perhaps Tagore's focus on cross-cultural dialogue is not so surprising, given his personal history. A descendant of Indian poet and polymath Rabindranath Tagore and the artistically pedigreed Tagore family, the gallerist describes his childhood in Calcutta as a series of alluring encounters with the world. "It was a very unconventional family. No one ever told you what to do. But as [children], we were surrounded by the lifestyle of artists, and the world of adults, and we wanted to be a part of that.

"We were living in two sets of homes in Calcutta, a few miles apart. The Chowringhee house was an old, old apartment - more or less the Harrods of Calcutta. Whereas Russel Street was in the Venetian palazzo style, a freestanding home.

"It was a constant open house," Tagore recalls. "People walked in from literally across the globe. Someone who came in for a few hours would end up staying for a year. It was a very laissez-faire atmosphere - if you came with an introduction the door was open. It didn't matter if you had a lot or little. You just became part of the house."