There is no doubt who owns this sprawling, 7,000 sq ft apartment in Quarry Bay. Hanging right next to the front door to greet every visitor is an extraordinary oil-on-canvas portrait of designer and artist Alan Chan by leading contemporary Chinese artist Zeng Fanzhi, who rarely paints to order, and not just for anyone. Just around the corner, a series of mock film posters are lit like the marquee of a theatre, each depicting Chan in a different starring role. In one, he’s a suited, James Bond-esque hero. In another he’s posing—tastefully—totally naked. “I have the posters made to mark my birthdays,” says Chan from behind his signature owlish glasses. The latest, an image that features Chan sitting on a crescent moon with a fishing rod—a play on the Dreamworks logo—was unveiled at Chan’s 70th birthday celebrations in January.
That milestone was particularly special because it also marked 50 years since Chan began working as a designer and 40 years since he founded Alan Chan Design Company, which has created album covers for stars such as Leslie Cheung and Anita Mui, the logo of legendary Eighties nightclub Canton Disco, clocks for Seiko, furniture collections, and branding for City’super, Fancl and Hong Kong International Airport, among dozens of other projects. To mark the occasion, Chan decided to go all out. Rather than taking over a restaurant or bar and filling it with hundreds of friends, as he has done in previous years, he converted a floor of an industrial building into his very own private museum, styling it as an apartment filled with hundreds of items from his vast collection of art, antiques and furniture.
Originally, Chan had planned to move everything back into storage after his party but, for now, is keeping the space as is. He regularly hosts dinners here and is mulling opening it to art and design students, patrons of local arts institutions and maybe even to the general public. In the long term, he hopes to relocate these displays to his own permanent private museum, which he wants to open either in Hong Kong or Japan.
“I bought this place 30 years ago for investment,” he says. For most of that time it was rented out for events, including to top fashion brands, who used it to showcase new collections to journalists and big-spending customers. “Chanel covered the whole space in pink carpets and made a VIP room for their top clients. Bringing VIP tai tais [to this industrial building] gave them a big surprise, and it was designed so that it could be anywhere in the world—it could’ve been Paris, London, Tokyo, Russia, wherever.”
Chan has now transformed the space in a similarly dramatic fashion, dividing it into four very different rooms. The first, which he refers to as the cabinet of curiosities, is dominated by three large glass cases that house glittering objects from Chan’s silverware collection, a hair-raising group of plastic Kewpie dolls from Japan and knickknacks and figurines Chan has picked up around the world, including a limited-edition statuette that was a collaboration between Kaws and acclaimed Chinese artist Yue Minjun.
On one side of that space is a drawing room, where almost every square inch of wall is hidden behind artworks by big names such as star Young British Artist Marc Quinn and Japanese Pop artist Keiichi Tanaami. On the other side is a dining room with a square table set for ten with a selection of Chan’s antique porcelain collection. Finally, there’s a music room dominated by 19th-century portrait paintings from France, offset by an enormous Damien Hirst painting of a glittery red heart filled with butterflies, a lip-shaped, crimson sofa and piles of Louis Vuitton trunks.
The pairing of items throughout the apartment is, by Chan’s own admission, jarring. “I like the contrast,” he says, gesturing to the pairing of century-old silverware made in Japan for noble European families with plastic, doe-eyed Kewpie dolls made from the Fifties onwards, which he picks up at flea markets around Japan. “It’s very shocking, even for my closest friends. My collection is not about showing off wealth, it’s about having the taste to pair things together. In here you will find masterpieces that might be worth a million dollars next to things that cost maybe a couple of hundred dollars.”
Affinity For The Arts
Chan was introduced to art and design by his father, a fruit seller who once entertained customers by making carvings in the produce; later, he outfitted the family home with furniture he made from fruit crates. Chan says he’s inherited his father’s eye, and he started collecting when he was still a teenager. “I’ve got the movie ticket from the time I took my first girlfriend to the cinema,” he says, but his collecting changed from a casual hobby to an all-consuming obsession on a 1975 trip to Japan with his wife, Sandra. The couple became fascinated with the country’s aesthetic and filled their suitcases with ceramics, woodblock prints, silk obi sashes and more.