Billionaire Shanghai art collectors Wang Wei and Liu Yiqian have big plans for their museums

The auction world loves Wang Wei and Liu Yiqian, her husband. They embody a breed of newly moneyed Chinese collectors with very broad taste and they have spent a good chunk of an estimated US$1.2 billion fortune (according to Forbes) on art since 1992. They even have their own museums to house their growing collections - two Long Museums in Shanghai and, by next spring, another one in Chongqing.

In April last year, Liu famously swiped his American Express card 24 times to pay for a HK$281 million, Ming dynasty ceramic "chicken cup" and then, with proprietorial swagger, sipped tea from it in front of a bemused world press. This March, the man who has become a billionaire by playing the notoriously volatile A-share stock market threw down another HK$348 million for an embroidered Tibetan tapestry, setting an international auction record for a Chinese work of art. This sort of high-profile bidding has made them celebrities of the auction market, a place where most collectors prefer anonymity.

Internationally, it is the couple's collection of antiques and modern and contemporary art that grabs the most interest. Back home, their sizeable hoard of Chinese communist revolutionary art is equally well-known and other local museums often ask to borrow from the collection.

The latest is the Hunan Provincial Museum, which also happens to own one of the country's most important cultural legacies - the relics from Mawangdui, a Han-dynasty burial site. When the museum reopens in 2016 after renovations, it plans to honour Hunan's local communist revolutionaries - Mao Zedong is the most famous - with a temporary exhibition that will feature many of Long Museum's sweeping landscapes with Mao in heroic stances and other paintings of ruddy-faced socialists in high spirits.