Chinese Art’s Final Frontier Might Be New York
The Western art market is desperate to get into China. Why hasn’t the reverse occurred?
Courtesy of the artist and Chambers Fine Art
Like many liberal arts graduates before him, in the mid 1990s, Gang Zhao found himself, with some reservations, working in finance. “I was an artist, I didn’t study economics,” says Zhao, who was born in China, studied painting in Maastricht, the Netherlands, and then got a B.A. from Vassar College.
After a few years working as an artist in New York, he needed to pay the bills, so Zhao made the switch. He was hired by a now-defunct boutique firm on 56th Street, working on mergers and acquisitions and initial public offering advisory projects. Once he had made enough money, he enrolled in an MFA program at Bard College.