This story has been updated with a statement from the the Los Angeles County Museum of Art. Six years is a long time to live with a death sentence. But after being diagnosed with terminal pancreatic cancer in 2015, Budiardjo “Budi” Tek harnessed the same positivity and drive that saw him rescue his company from bankruptcy in the 1990s, and poured himself into an urgent mission to preserve the legacy of his private museum and considerable Chinese art collection. Tek, who died in Hong Kong on March 18 at the age of 65, was a Chinese-Indonesian businessman who made his fortune in the poultry business. Before his illness, he was the head of Sierad Produce, one of Indonesia’s largest vertically integrated chicken producers, which sold everything from chicken feed and live birds to processed meat, and whose international restaurant business once ran the Wendy’s burger franchise in Hong Kong. In an interview with The Wall Street Journal in 1998, Tek gave a vivid description of what it was like for an import-dependent company in Indonesia to be caught out by the 1997 Asian financial crisis and ensuing sharp devaluation in the Indonesian rupiah, and to have creditors constantly knocking on his door. Eventually, he sold assets, changed the way the chickens were sold, and pulled through. He remained director and president of Sierad Produce until he sold it to the Angkosubroto family in 2015. His business smarts aside, Tek is best known for his vast art collection and for opening the Yuz Museum in a former Shanghai airport hangar in 2014, which has continued to stand out as a cultural landmark in mainland China despite the increasingly crowded private museum landscape. That is owed to both Tek’s initial collecting strategy and the international partnerships he started after he began planning his legacy in earnest . When he started to buy contemporary art in 2004 – obsessively, by his own account – he decided to focus on “mega size” pieces that were offputtingly difficult for individual collectors to store and display. The sheer monumentality of works such as Huang Yongping’s massive metal and bamboo structure Snake Tower (2009), Sun Yuan and Peng Yu’s thrashing, mechanical construct Freedom (2009), and Ai Weiwei ’s C ircle of Animals / Zodiac Heads (2011), which he donated to the Los Angeles County Museum of Art (Lacma) just this month, would help Yuz Museum stand up to the biggest and the best institutions around the world, he said. He built the first Yuz Museum in Jakarta in 2006 but it is the Shanghai branch, and his belief in that city’s cultural vibrancy, that would form the basis of the international network that he began to put in place after his diagnosis. In 2018, Yuz Museum signed a deal with Lacma to set up a Hong Kong-based charitable foundation to which Tek would donate his collection, giving both museums equal access to the works for future exhibitions. Then, in 2019, Qatar Museums joined the partnership and the three institutions began to develop exhibitions together. These include Yoshitomo Nara’s solo exhibition in Shanghai, and “Legacies of Exchange: Chinese Contemporary Art” on show in Los Angeles, from which seven pieces, including Ai’s C ircle of Animals / Zodiac Heads , had been gifted to Lacma by Tek and the Yuz Foundation. Both exhibitions are currently running. Zao Wou-Ki’s stepdaughter donates works by Chinese painter to M+ museum In the end, Tek’s diminishing health, along with the pandemic, made it impossible to establish the joint foundation between Lacma and Shanghai’s Yuz Museum as planned, says Michael Govan, chief executive officer of Lacma. “Budi Tek has been a great inspiration to me and Lacma, encouraging us to link East and West, Los Angeles and Shanghai, with contemporary art,” Govan says. “Beyond having established one of the best collections of Chinese contemporary art, especially of the 1990s, Budi continued through his later life to collect and commission new work from young artists from everywhere. By establishing a foundation, and his pioneering Yuz Museum in the West Bund in Shanghai, Budi helped energise the growth of museums in Shanghai, which is now truly an international centre for contemporary art. “Personally, to me, Budi was a great inspiration in his commitment to art and his many creative ideas, especially as he bravely confronted his advanced illness for many years.” The family’s obituary posted on WeChat reads: “It is with a saddened and heavy heart that we announce the passing of patriotic Chinese-Indonesian entrepreneur, art philanthropist, and collector Mr. Budi Tek. After six years of strenuous battle with late-stage pancreatic cancer, Mr. Tek passed away peacefully on March 18th, 2022, at the age of 65, surrounded by his beloved family in Hong Kong.” Tek was an Asia-Pacific member and collector member at Tate Britain, and in 2017 he was made an Officer of the Légion d’honneur by France.