Art Collector:
Clinton Ng
For Sydney’s Clinton Ng, the role of the collector is that of the custodian.
Clinton Ng might not play favourites with his art collection, but he can’t conceal his enthusiasm for the pieces that light him up. When quizzing Ng about why A Bar at the Folies-Bergère, Vik Muniz’s freewheeling riff on the Manet masterpiece, currently takes centre stage in his Sydney apartment, his response is the mark of someone with unswerving faith in art’s transformative potential: “It just gives and gives and gives.”
But Ng, who has spent the last decade cultivating a 400-work collection – which includes everything from photographs and video works by Thomas Ruff, Wolfgang Tillmans, Rosemary Laing and Shaun Gladwell, to sculpture and paintings by Olafur Eliasson, Thomas Hirschhorn, Ahmed Alsoudani, Hiromi Tango and Sam Jinks – knows that a collector’s trajectory isn’t down to passion alone. By religiously attending art fairs and combing the internet with missionary zeal, the busy gastroenterologist – who sits on the board of Art Month Sydney and whose own policy of giving has sparked loans to institutions including the Art Gallery of New South Wales, the University of Queensland and the Ian Potter Centre: NGV Australia – hopes to capture the breadth, depth and virtuosity of the present moment in contemporary art.
How did you first discover collecting and what prompted you to invest in your first piece?
I was bored shitless doing my PhD on irritable bowel syndrome and I found myself surfing the net for art and visiting galleries to remain sane. I’ve been drawn to art from a young ... Subscribe to read this article in full
