Private museum in touch with the public
Lynn Fung wants visitors to get tactile with displays at Liang Yi Museum, writes Madeline Gressel
Lynn Fung is the ideal ambassador for her family's new private museum, the Liang Yi, which opened in February in a monochromatic 25,000-square-foot space on Hollywood Road.
Like the museum, Fung is elegant, exacting and chic yet understated. The space is painted white and sparsely dotted with pieces, none of which are accompanied by captions, but Fung wears all black, with subtle scarlet accents. The juxtaposition between museum and managing director is striking and visually pleasant.
It's when you sit in this chair, with your feet dangling above the floor ... that you begin to understand it in a more intimate way
The museum houses two exhibitions: one of Ming and Qing dynasty furniture in rare hardwoods, valued well above HK$1 million each, and the other of jewelled early 20th-century vanity boxes from storied European jewellers such as Cartier and Van Cleef & Arpels. Both displays come from the private collection of Fung's father, Peter Fung Yiu-fai, who began collecting while she was growing up in the 1980s. On Saturdays, after a dim sum brunch, Peter Fung would saunter over to Hollywood Road to build his collection, piece by piece.
"The borders of China were just opening, so a lot of these antiques were coming straight to Hollywood Road," Lynn Fung recalls. "Pieces started appearing in our home. At first it was just a small footstool, fairly innocuous. Then they started getting larger and larger. My school desk was replaced by a huge antique. As a child I thought, 'What is this monstrosity? What will my friends think?' We lived with these pieces in our day-to-day life, which was quite an education."
Fung was initially indifferent to the furniture. After studying literature at Northwestern University and then King's College London, she attended culinary school in the US; she returned to Hong Kong to write about food and, later, luxury watches and jewellery. "I really gained an appreciation for those arts - the precise and detailed craftsmanship that, frankly speaking, I think only the Swiss are truly amazing at."
Five years ago, Peter Fung began buying warehouse lots built in the 1960s above the antiques shops on Hollywood Road. He accumulated them one by one, eventually creating the enormous space now home to the museum. At first, he considered converting it into an antiques-filled clubhouse but his daughter told him: "That's crazy. First of all, you don't have enough friends to fill 25,000 square feet. Also, I think Hong Kong is ready for a place where the public can really gain some awareness of this lost craftsmanship, which is such a big part of our collective culture and history."
Moreover, "people who love this type of furniture are usually my father's age and older. If we don't share this knowledge, appreciation will be lost entirely."