  ressed in an Armani suit and wearing a pair of Paul Smith sneakers, Guan Yi – the influential art collector – steps out of his chauffeur-driven van and walks toward the door of his suburban Beijing home like a professional tour guide.
He passes a 48-ton carved stone replica of a Mercedes Benz jeep (created by Zhang Huan); glances toward a rust-colored revolutionary sculpture made by the “Political Pop” artist Wang Guangyi; and then lingers near a pair of 56-foot-long airplane wings,which are bolted to the ground. The piece is from Huang Yongping’s “Bat Project" installation, a partial replica of the American spy plane that crashed in China and was dismantled by the Chinese government in 2001.
“This is one of my favorite pieces,” Guan Yi says with a smile, tapping one of the wings. “This is classic Huang Yong Ping.”
Inside, Guan Yi shows off a house he designed with a connecting 1,500 square meter warehouse, which serves as a kind of private museum, holding one of the nation’s most important collections of Chinese contemporary art, including works by acclaimed artists like Fang Lijun, Zhang Xiaogang, Gu Dexin, Yan Lei, Ai Wei Wei and Zhou Tiehai.
Another warehouse, one kilometer away, is stocked with a huge art installation called "Canton Express," which came from the 2003 Venice Biennale and was curated by Hou Hanru. A third 500 square meter space in the northern city of Qingdao is also filled with Guan Yi’s collection of experimental art spanning the period from about 1979 to the present.
 Indeed, five years after he began collecting, Guan Yi, 40, is regarded as one of the most important figures in Chinese contemporary art. Although the Chinese art scene has long been dominated by wealthy collectors from Europe and the United States, China now has its first home-grown contemporary art tycoon: Guan Yi.
And he is, perhaps, all the more important here because the Chinese government has largely ignored contemporary art and the country does not have a single noteworthy modern art museum.
There is no MoMa, no Moca, no Guggenheim and hardly any permanent collections of modern art in Beijing, despite its thriving arts scene.
The boom in contemporary art has, however, begun to create a class of wealthy Chinese born collectors,particularly among the nation’s real estate tycoons. But none are as big as Guan Yi, who has already acquired over 500 art pieces that some art experts estimate to be worth as much as $50 million.
“He’s one of the few -- perhaps the only -- serious collector I know,” says Hou Hanru,the well-known independent curator. “He really wants to build up a collection with an historical sense. He’s different from other collectors who are doing it for investments. And he has a real understanding of contemporary art.”
 The son of a chemical engineer in northeast China, Guan Yi now has ambitious plans to create his own private foundation and museum to house his growing collection of modern and experimental art.
“In the future I want to create a museum with an international vision,” he says, sitting in his home office here surrounded by some of his most valuable art pieces. “I recently went to the US, and I went to the Dia Beacon museum an hour and a half from New York City. It’s made from an old factory. I think that is the style.”
Those who know Guan Yi have no doubt he’ll succeed. He is a man obsessed with modern art, they say. He spends his days studying philosophy, reading art books and magazines -- and even analyzing his own collecting habits. He is also busy commissioning some of the country’s leading artists to create special works for him.
He shows up at exhibitions, auctions and seminars on modern art. He chauffeurs a select group of his favorite artists around Beijing.And he regularly dines with foreign collectors and museum directors, offering them detailed tours of his private collection.
Lately, he’s been traveling extensively in the United States and Europe, trying to put his own collection in perspective. And while he quietly champions contemporary Chinese Art to anyone who will listen, he also worries that the growing mania to buy modern art in China is spoiling artists and sapping their creative juices.
“Many artists are losing their thoughts, their vision,” he says. “The market is too hot;it’s hotter than it ought to be. That’s why some artists are busy selling rather than creating.”
 When Guan Yi began collecting in 2001, he says he did it partly as an act of cultural preservation, hoping to create a home in China for some of the country’s best modern works.
Traditional and classical Chinese art are widely collected in places like Beijing. But contemporary art is far more popular abroad than it is at home. And he saw the value in avant-garde works that challenged traditional notions of art
and explored the fringes of society.
His Mao was not the Mao hanging in Tiananmen Square, it is the Mao of Wang Guangyi,Sui Jianguo, Zhang Hongtu or Feng Mengbo – boxed, headless, re-examined and re-interpreted for modern times – the Mao images that emerged after 1989. Anything earlier is boring, or already well collected, he says.
“A lot of people collect traditional art. This doesn’t need me,” he says. “Also, history is going forward. We need something for the future. And I’m not sure this is patriotic but I feel Chinese shouldn’t have to leave the country to see this work.”
 uan Yi came to art from an unlikely place – the chemical industry. He was born in coastal, northeastern city of Qingdao. His father was a Chemical engineer and he says he was the younger, and more rebellious, of two boys who grew up during the Cultural Revolution.
“When I was young I was very mischievous,” he says.“I didn’t follow the rules. I always wanted to do things my own way.”
 Although he took an early liking to abstract art and photography, Guan Yi says he followed his father and brother by enrolling in the local oil college,where he majored in chemistry.But by the mid 1980s, he became captivated by the avant-garde art movement that was then blossoming in Beijing. In 1989, he followed reports of the historic“No U-Turn” exhibition at the National Gallery of Art- an exhibition which quickly became a symbol of the local art world’s belief that China was opening up and that there was no turning back.
But when the government cracked down on student activists and experimental artists after 1989, Guan Yi’s ambitions of becoming an artist or photographer were quashed. He says he was never very good at creating his own art, and that his ambitions vanished with the youthful idealism of the times.
“After the ’89 exhibition, everything closed,” he now says. “Your passion was chopped to pieces. You can’t do anything in that area. So I made business my passion.”
Guan Yi says he continued to experiment with photography and he often read about contemporary art (he even painted his own “No U-Turn” sign in his bedroom for inspiration). But for the next decade he was mostly working as a businessman.
And then, in the late 1990s, he changed direction. He began collecting classic furniture, antiques and old Chinese bricks. And then he made the leap into the contemporary art market.
 By 2001, he began showing up at art shows, galleries and auctions, seeking to acquire modern art pieces, he says.
“I was in a hurry to collect. But I didn’t know how,” he says. “So I read some books on collecting. Then I made my own direction, and wherever the work was, I bought it – sometimes at a gallery; sometimes from the artist and sometimes at auction.”
He went on: “When I bought at auction, the first price they gave was usually the final price. I was often the only one bidding. No one else bid. Gu Wenda, Cai Guoqiang.. there was no one else there bidding for their works.”
“But major artists and collectors didn’t really begin to hear about Guan Yi until 2002, when he purchased Huang Yongping’s massive installation, “The World’s Factory.”
Since then, Guan Yi has gone on an aggressive buying spree. Today, he has at least one piece from virtually all the major contemporary artists in China, beginning with Wang Keping, who in the late 1970s began testing the limits of artistic freedom with his wood carved Buddhist sculptures.
Now, Guan Yi is cataloging his pieces, like Gu Dexin’s rusted installation, “1990-2005,” Liu Wei’s “Smoker,” and Yan Lei’s psychedelic, “Upgraded Space – Colored Circles.”And also works by Wu Shanzhuan and Wang Xingwei.
Apparently, huge installations are not an obstacle for Guan Yi, who after acquiring the entire installation exhibition,“Canton Express,” from the Venice Biennale simply rented a warehouse to store the piece.
Now, he’s traveling abroad to study the larger world of contemporary art and museums and planning to write his own textbook on art.
 “I already have an outline,” he says. “I want to create a textbook for westerners to understand Chinese contemporary art.”
More importantly, he is working out the details for at least one major private art museum in the suburbs of Beijing.
“I want to build an international foundation. I’ll contribute most of my collection. I won’t put my name on it. But I want international art critics and curators to become members of this foundation,” he says. “I want to make it prestigious so it can help the art world.”
Many of the works he collects are experimental, even radical in nature, he says. He says he scorns commercial or mainstream pieces.
“I believe in the 80/20 theory,” he says. “80 percent of the people are wrong and 20 percent are right. So if the newspapers say an exhibition is good,I won’t go. I never want to follow the mainstream.”
And he’s speaking out -- to artists, collectors and nearly anyone who will listen about the grave challenges now facing the Chinese art world. Prices are simply rising too fast, he says.
 This is a remarkable statement for a major buyer. But even Guan Yi –one of the nation’s leading collectors – says he has temporarily stopped buying. He worries about a market bubble.
“Now, even if you bring $10 million to China you won’t be able to succeed,” he says. “There’s no work to buy and collectors won’t sell their works. So that’s why art is very, very hot.”
He adds: “A lot of funds are coming to China to invest and this is a problem. This is not good for Chinese art. They just want to buy as an investment.”
Soaring demand for Chinese art, he says, is causing many artists to lose their vision and create works that simply pander to the marketplace.“Art should be experimental and help power the culture,” he says. "It should lead the people.”
But Guan Yi insists he hasn’t lost his own vision. He wants to leave something significant behind, and allow people to rethink a world that is evolving at warp speed.
“Everyone wants to leave the world and get a stamp that reads: ‘This person was of value,’” he says.“After 10 years, I’ll retire and I want to feel I did something of value."
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