Source:
https://scmp.com/culture/arts-entertainment/article/1940028/what-mori-art-museum-can-teach-china-about-showing
Culture

What Mori Art Museum can teach China about showing contemporary art

Yoshiko Mori talks about how she and her late husband began collecting new artists’ works to open Japan’s eyes to contemporary art, and explains novel ways museum in Tokyo’s Roppongi Hills draws audiences

Detail from Takashi Murakami’s The 500 Arhats at the Mori Art Museum. Photo: Corbis

An Asian collector makes an astronomical bid for an important modern Western painting auctioned by Christie’s, securing a work that had never been in Asian hands. It is also the most money paid for the artist’s work.

No, this wasn’t last November when Chinese billionaire Liu Yiqian paid US$170.4 million for Amedeo Modigliani’s Nu Couché. It was May 1990, when a Japanese businessman called Ryoei Saito paid US$82.5 million for Vincent van Gogh’s Portrait of Dr Gachet. The next evening, he paid US$78.1 million for Renoir’s Bal du Moulin de la Galette at a Sotheby’s sale.