A look inside the Liang Yi Museum
A private museum showcasing tycoon Peter Fung's personal collection of Chinese and European antiques accumulated over four decades opens its doors next week. Enid Tsui gets a sneak preview
Compared with the billionaire collectors on the mainland today, oil baron and collector extraordinaire J. Paul Getty was a study in understatement. Witness the building frenzy propelled by a generation's desire to assert its cultural heritage and economic might. The result is hundreds of astonishing landmarks that are temples for personal collections of antiques and paintings.
Here in Hong Kong, such private museums are virtually unheard of, despite the city's rich tradition in contemporary connoisseurship. So the emergence of the Liang Yi Museum, which opens on Hollywood Road next week, is all the more remarkable.
The admission fee comes with a personalised guided tour which we hope our visitors will value
"There just isn't enough space here. In the mainland, you can open a museum as a hobby," says Lynn Fung, its managing director.
When the museum opens on February 28, the public will be treated to a spectacle of rare Ming and Qing dynasty furniture and exquisite vanity cases - antique minaudières and other portable repositories of cosmetics made by Europe's top houses in the early 20th century.
The owner of this eccentric coupling of East and West is Lynn Fung's father, Peter Fung Yiu-fai, whose reputation as a ruthless corporate raider is matched by the respect for his legendary hoard accumulated over four decades.
