At the age of 22, the Chinese it-boy Michael Xufu Huang has positioned himself as one of the most important names in the young art world, navigating, seemingly seamlessly, between NYC gallery dinners, Gucci fashion shows in Milan, international research trip with the New Museum, and art history classes for his undergraduate degree at University of Pennsylvania. With a knack for entrepreneurship and everything post-internet, Huang is competing to be the ultimate bridge between the art worlds of China and the West.
Michael – whose parents are not in art – began collecting, rather unusually, at the age of 16. Despite his exceptionality, Michael belongs to an emerging clique of young collectors, who are globalised, educated, connected, and unconcerned with the hegemonic canons of art history. Along with Insta-celebrity Pari Ehsan and the 24-year old, second-generation Zabludowicz collector Tiffany Zabludowicz – whom Michael refers to as his “art world BFF” – Michael is a particularly strong supporter of emerging new media and post-internet practices at the forefront of technological innovation. He is a long-standing supporter of LA-based Amalia Ulman, whose work blurs the distinctions between fact and fiction through the veneer of the digital, and most recently funded her showcase at the DIS-curated Berlin Biennial and London’s Arcadia Missa. “I think I just collect the art that echoes with me the most,” he reflects on his taste. “I grew up in the digital age, and I really understand that language. Every generation has their drive – religion, war, the invention of photography – it drives society forward. Now, it just has to be the internet. It’s the historical area that we’re in.”
Having co-founded M-Woods, one of Beijing’s most notable and fastest-growing museums for contemporary art. “With M Woods, we want to break some boundaries. We bring artist that we believe are good. No museum in China has the same profile as ours.” Minoring in marketing, he sees the entrepreneurial as an integral part of any art-related endeavour, for both museums and artists themselves: “It’s important. If you’re an artist, and if you want to be good in any way, you have to market yourself.” Quite appropriately, then, when he secured a large-scale Andy Warhol exhibition at his museum this summer, including many of the pop artist’s iconic screen-tests, his durational video pieces, as well as his Silver Clouds, which levitated in his studio-cum-social hub The Factory for several years. “We are a very young, forward-looking museum, so I thought we should do something edgy with him,” Michael explains, as he points to the many precursors of new media art in his work. “He was the most contemporary artist of his time.”