Vancouver Art Gallery gifted US$30 million by Hong Kong textile heirs for expansion plans
- The donation from the family that founded Crocodile Garments is the largest of its kind to an arts and culture organisation in British Columbia
- The building will be named the Chan Centre for the Visual Arts after the family, which has been in Vancouver for 30 years
A C$40 million (US$30 million) donation from the family that founded Hong Kong’s Crocodile Garments company has revived the Vancouver Art Gallery’s ambitious expansion plans, stalled since 2008 by a lack of funds.
On Wednesday, the gallery announced that the Chan family had made a donation towards the C$300 million needed for a Herzog & de Meuron-designed new building in the city centre that will provide much needed space.
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The gallery has been housed in the neo-classical former courthouse on Hornby Street since the 1950s.
The new building will be named the Chan Centre for the Visual Arts after the family, which has been in Vancouver for 30 years. The descendants of the late Chan Shun – who sold Crocodile to Lim Por-yen of the Hong Kong conglomerate Lai Sun Group in 1987 – have built up a sizeable real estate empire in the US and Canada operating under the name the Burrard Group.
The gift from the Chan family amounts to the largest single private donation to an arts and culture organisation in British Columbia.
“We truly believe in the power of art to bring people together and to bridge divides [and] cultural gaps to promote social understanding, and to help people better understand themselves and others, and that is what the new Vancouver Art Gallery building will help accomplish,” says Christian Chan, a trustee of the gallery and grandson of Chan Shun.
The donation lifts the total amount raised from individual donors to C$85 million, which significantly increases the chance that the gallery will be able to meet the goal of raising C$100 million from the private sector laid down by the provincial government as a condition for receiving further help from local taxpayers.
The 300,000-square-foot (28,000-square-metre) building is designed by the same Swiss firm behind the Beijing “Bird’s Nest” National Stadium and M+ in Hong Kong’s West Kowloon Cultural District. It will house 25 permanent galleries with dedicated spaces for indigenous art and the late British Columbian artist Emily Carr.
A lot of wood and glass will be used to highlight the city’s proximity to nature and the building has a top-heavy design that puts the bulk of its mass above street level to leave room for a large ground-floor courtyard.
Vancouver Art Gallery director Kathleen Bartels says the gallery hopes to finish building the new centre in 2023 if its fundraising plan is on track.
The University of British Columbia’s Chan Centre for the Performing Arts was also named after the family, which made a large donation in 1989, the year they arrived in Vancouver.
