A Long Journey: A Selection from the Liu Yiqian and Wang Wei Collection

“We hope to push beyond the boundaries of traditional art.. to provide the public with a global art education while also strengthening local cultural roots” - Liu Yiqian and Wang Wei





Dedicated to a diversity of visual arts – Western and Eastern, ancient and contemporary – Liu Yiqian and Wang Wei first began collecting over thirty years ago with a singular vision to build a museum that would leave no part of art and cultural history untouched. Established in 2012, the Long Museum has since become a source of inspiration throughout Asia with a legacy that resists categorisation. The cumulative endeavours of a life lived in pursuit of artistic excellence, the collection is exceptionally diverse and entirely eclectic in style, provenance, genre and content. Pioneering in scope and exhilaratingly ambitious, the journey of the Long Museum has found Liu and Wang at the centre of a particular moment in history, their encyclopaedic collection affording a truly global artistic education whilst strengthening local cultural roots as one of the most significant public institutions in China. Creating a passage between visionaries and innovators that transcends temporal and spatial boundaries, Liu and Wang’s collection has connected the lives and works of history’s most iconic artists.


The selection of works which will be offered as part of this historic auction at Sotheby's is a tiny microcosm of a much larger story within the collection of Liu Yiqian and Wang Wei. A collection of incomparable quality, these works chart the revolutionary spirit of exceptional artists across 100 years of history, from ground-breaking Modernists to leaders of post-war abstraction and trailblazers at work today.