Jean-Marc Bottazzi On Why Good Collecting Is Not About 'Ticking Boxes' The Art Newspaper International Art News And Events

(MENAFN- USA Art News) Hong Kong Collector Jean-Marc Bottazzi on Building a 1,000-Work Collection by Going Deep

Jean-Marc Bottazzi's route into art collecting began far from the museum circuit. Raised, he says,“without much money, in a cultural desert near Lyon,” he didn't grow up with the kind of institutional access that often shapes a collector's eye. Instead, the spark came at home: his younger brother, the painter Guillaume Bottazzi, drew him into the habit of looking closely - and, eventually, buying.

Now a Japanese bond trader based in Hong Kong after a stint in Tokyo, Bottazzi has assembled a collection of around 1,000 works that mirrors his global biography. The holdings are especially strong in abstraction and conceptual photography, spanning Western Europe, the US, and East Asia. It is a collection built less like a checklist than a set of sustained conversations.

On the Western side, Bottazzi gravitates toward artists who pushed painting into new structures of thought and sensation. He collects American Abstract Expressionist Robert Motherwell (1915–1991) and has a particular admiration for French painter Simon Hantaï (1922–2008), known for his folded, fractal-like canvases and other experiments with the physical logic of paint. Bottazzi calls Hantaï“France's most important post-war artist.”

From Japan, his interests extend to the postwar avant-garde, including artists associated with Gutai, such as Kazuo Shiraga (1924–2008), whose practice tested the body's relationship to the painted surface. He also collects earlier experimental pioneers like Ei-Q (1911–1960), and owns several of the artist's unique photographic works made without a camera.

Having an artist in the family has also shaped Bottazzi's philosophy about what collecting should do.“You want to really make a difference to an artist's life,” he says.“It's not about ticking off boxes and having one of everything - otherwise your home will look like an apartment in Trump Tower.”

That idea of“deep collecting” is most visible in his long-term support of A-Yo, the 96-year-old Japanese artist whose rainbow-patterned paintings and sculptures embody an anti-elitist approach to art-making, influenced by Fluxus. Bottazzi owns more than 100 works by A-Yo and is in the process of acquiring another tranche.“When I collect, I really collect,” he says.

His commitment has also been public-facing. Bottazzi was the key lender to a recent monographic exhibition of A-Yo at M+, the Hong Kong museum where he is both a donor and a member of its international committee for visual art.

In a rapid-fire look at his collecting life, Bottazzi traces his first purchase to the early 1990s: an abstract, baroque-style painting by his brother. His most recent acquisition was either a“Fontana Tagli” or a photographic edition of Man Ray's“La Priere” (1930). The missed opportunities still sting: a Minotaur photograph by Man Ray he“didn't have the balls to buy” a decade ago, and a photograph of writer Yukio Mishima by Eikoh Hosoe that slipped away because he didn't move fast enough.

Asked what he would take from any museum in the world, Bottazzi doesn't hesitate: Marcel Duchamp's urinal.

His best advice for other collectors is pointed, and it echoes the structure of his own holdings:“Focus and commit to few. Try not to make a template collection just because you're rich.” He cites the collector Uli Sigg as an example of what sustained focus can accomplish.

Bottazzi's enthusiasm for Hong Kong is equally direct. For first-time visitors, his recommendation is to start with M+ - and then return.“It's the best thing to happen to the city,” he says, pointing to the productive friction the museum stages between Western and Eastern narratives. In Bottazzi's view, that tension is not a problem to be smoothed over, but the very condition that makes the city's cultural life feel alive.

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