Family business

In 2004, just as she was preparing for her final exams at the School of Oriental and African Studies in London, Nicole Schoeni heard the news that her father had died. Born in Switzerland, Manfred Schoeni was a successful entrepreneur across many different businesses and the founder of the renowned Hong Kong Schoeni Art Gallery. When he died, he was just 58. Nicole was 23. She flew home to Hong Kong and, even in the midst of her grief, with the support of her mother Wai Yin, immediately took over running the gallery.

Over the previous decade, Manfred Schoeni had brought to light many of the leading figures of an outstanding generation of contemporary Chinese artists. These included now significant names, such as Yue Minjun, Liu Xiaodong, Zhang Xiaogang, Yang Shaobin and Zeng Fanzhi. Manfred had discovered these avant-garde artists while travelling for his antiques business to the Chinese mainland. Most worked under the official radar in the Yuanmingyuan artists’ village, north-west of Beijing.

Manfred wrote later, on the eve of the 1994 two-man show Faces Behind the Bamboo Curtain that he curated, “It was a pure chance that I met Yang Shaobin and Yue Minjun… Instantly, when I saw their painting, my inner feelings and passion started once again to get the better of logical thought.” However illogical it seemed at the time, by 2004 these artists were beginning to achieve fame and fortune. Yue’s strand of Cynical Realism, with his exaggerated laughing man self-portraits, caught the world’s attention at the 48th Venice Biennale in 1999, opening the international art market to him. In 2007, just three years after Manfred’s death, Yue’s satirical masterpiece The Execution (1995) became the most-valuable work by a Chinese contemporary artist at auction when it sold in London for £2.9 million.

For nine years, Nicole Schoeni ran her father’s gallery at full pelt. She mounted 16 exhibitions a year, navigated the exploding market for some among her father’s stable of artists, while seeking out the next generation of emerging artists – including a focus on the challenging, nascent market for Hong Kong artists and urban art. In 2013, she took a break, redirecting her energies into curation and art consultancy. In May, Bonhams Hong Kong is offering 15 works that the family has retained over many years. The sale, REdiscovery: Manfred Schoeni’s Legacy, takes place almost 20 years after Nicole’s father’s death, and ten years since the closure of his gallery, as a gesture of homage to Manfred. The small collection includes work by perhaps the most successful of all her father’s protégés: Zeng Fanzhi (b. 1964). His famous Mask Series 1996 No.6, a large oil-on-canvas diptych of youths wearing exaggerated smiling masks and red scarves, auctioned for more than HK$70 million ($9 million) in 2008 and HK$105 million in 2017, before selling for an artist record of ¥161 million ($23.3 million) in Beijing in 2020. His works here also feature masked figures in Western dress, ambivalently embracing Western lifestyles. Other artists represented in the sale include Yue Minjun, Yang Shaobin, Liu Wei and Liu Xiaodong.

Nicole says, “It has been hard to let these go.” As she points out, at the time he died, her father had not yet seen the market frenzy for Chinese contemporary art, which really took hold from 2006. No, Manfred had supported these artists out of passion. From a poor background himself, he had been guided away from his interest in art to study hotel management. This, and a strong appetite for risk, had brought him to Hong Kong where he built several businesses – including hotels, restaurants, factories and an antiques gallery. He was, however, an enthusiastic self-taught painter, and as soon as he met these artists he recognised the significance of their efforts. He immediately recognised how their work registered the seismic changes in Chinese society brought about by Deng Xiaoping’s 1978 Open Door Policy, especially as those changes had brought these children of Mao’s Cultural Revolution into rapid conflict with a still monolithic authoritarian state. In an interview for LATITUDE/ATTITUDE in 2012, an exhibition celebrating the 20th anniversary of the Schoeni Gallery, Zeng Fanzhi recalled: “Actually, there were only two people in [Hong Kong] who were interested in Chinese art in early ’90s: one is Johnson [Chang, of Hanart TZ] and the other is Nicole’s father [Manfred Schoeni].”

Although he spoke no Mandarin, Manfred impressed the artists with his generosity and integrity. He would arrive with cash, artists’ materials and books about contemporary Western art – all hard to come by in 1990s China. His flamboyant love of life – especially wine and cigars – charmed them. At first, he had no space. Indeed, in November 1992 his first show, of work by Liu Dahong, was held at the China Club, Sir David Tang’s chic Hong Kong restaurant, almost entirely furnished with antiques provided by Schoeni. By March 1993, Manfred had secured a gallery space and began a rolling programme of exhibitions accompanied by substantial catalogues, many written by leading scholars in the field, such as Li Xianting, James Cahill and Tsao Hsingyuan.

Nicole says, “Something unique about Dad was that he was buying entire collections from the artists, so that they wouldn’t have to worry about income. They could continue to create and Dad would bear all the risk.” In a particularly spectacular demonstration of faith in his artists, in 1997 he organised an exhibition of 15 artists called 8+8-1, for which he commissioned more than 700 small-scale works. Most did not sell. Nicole says, “It was only later that those artists really became sought after.” He was also instrumental in enabling two major exhibitions: China!, in Bonn, in 1996, and (in collaboration with curator Walter Smerling) Chinart, an exhibition of many Chinese Contemporary Artists which toured five European locations between 2003 and 2005.

Gradually, through his efforts and those of Johnson Chang, news got out. Western collectors, spearheaded by Swiss banker Uli Sign, began to recognise the significance of this generation of artists. The boom among Western collectors in the mid-2000s was quickly succeeded by the growing enthusiasm for these artists among Chinese collectors. By 2013, however, Nicole was becoming disillusioned. Many of the most successful artists had naturally moved to bigger international galleries. The urgent radicalism of the art of the 1990s, with its creative collisions between Western and Chinese artistic traditions, gave way to more crowd-pleasing imitations, and collectors seemed increasingly focused on investment potential rather than on whether or not they cared for the art. Nicole says that, while her father was an astute businessman, “he had an instinct and a very keen eye and just a love of art.” She treasures some notes she found, where he had written: “Art is often presented in a form fitting the experts and critics. Art should be free from any preconceived analysis by others, because art should speak its own language.” Manfred’s collection reflected his own eclectic taste. With this sale, Nicole is relaunching the collection in a similar spirit. “I am more experienced and mature now, and understand that there should be an evolution.” The proceeds from the sale will enable her to pursue her own collecting passions, as well as support her new venture Schoeni Projects, launched in London in 2020 as a platform for emerging artists in both Asia and the West.

Emma Crichton-Miller writes for Apollo Magazine.

Stay updated with our auctions. Sign up to receive your weekly newsletter of global auctions, stories and more. Subscribe now