Wellington Wang (王度) is a professional collector who, at 69, has established himself as something of a cultural celebrity. Warm, generous and free-spoken, he easily wins over his interlocutors with a childlike simplicity and his fascinating stories, drawing on his experience building up a collection of Chinese antiques numbering over 50 thousands pieces.
Wang has earned his reputation as a world-class collector for his collection of antique Chinese weaponry and Yixing (宜興) purple sand pottery ware (紫砂陶). He has also accumulated a extensive assortment of cultural and historical relics ranging from lacquerware, bronze and jade artifacts to ancient furniture and decorative art works such as thumb rings, snuff bottles, belt hooks and plaques. Local and international museums have often borrowed objects from Wang's collection when putting together major exhibitions on Chinese themes.
Wang's life-long infatuation with swords and knives began at a young age. As a seven-year-old boy, he found great pleasure in watching his general father and a graduate from the elite Whampoa Military Academy (黃埔軍校) polishing his army gear.
PHOTOS: COURTESY OF MEIMEN
After graduating from the National Chengchi University (政治大學), Wang went to study at New York University, where he began to seriously pursue his interest in collecting antique weaponry.
Contrary to the common belief that antique collectors need vast assets to back up their expensive hobbies, Wang started his lifelong interest working as a bus boy to put himself through college.
"After graduation, I got a job that paid US$200 a month, which was pretty much the same amount of money that went to my landlord. So I got a bank loan and opened a restaurant with friends and the chef who used to work for [the famous painter] Zhang Da-qian (張大千)," Wang recalled.
The first Sichuan restaurant in New York City immediately became a sensation and expanded into a restaurant chain. When his father's health deteriorated in 1984, Wang sold all his assets in the US and returned home.
Meanwhile, Wang had come to believe that as a collector he had an important mission in life, which was to recover China's historical relics lost in foreign lands.
"During China's Cultural Revolution, countless historical items were shifted abroad and ended up in the foreign hands ... . When I went to the Metropolitan Museum, it always hurt me to see Chinese cultural artifacts being kept in other people's museums," Wang said.
Unlike his entrepreneur friends such as Barry Lam (林百里) and Robert Tsao (曹興誠), who collect items from premiere auctions house for tax deductions and personal enjoyment, Wang has traveled across the world over the past 40 years, seeking out curios hidden in some of the most unlikely places.
"Years before when Yixing was just a remote village in Jiangsu Province, I would go there once a year for the purple sand pottery and tea pots. Occasionally, cultural artifacts found their way into Wang's hands by chance, as these object "have a spirit," according to Wang.
Immersing himself in books and museums, the self-taught master in ancient Chinese artifacts has published 15 illustrated books on his personal collection, which is classified into 38 categories.
Yet the unparalleled achievement has come at a hefty price.
"Nobody believes that with a collection worth NT$1 billion, I am in fact in debt. I just keep on collecting things as long as I can afford to ... My wife says I'm a nut case," Wang said.
Wang's wife may have a point, since in this collector's dictionary, "as long as I can afford" means borrowing money to bring antiques home.
Giving away a life of luxury for his calling, the aging collector's urgent wish is to find his massive collection a new home in Taiwan, hoping that the government and billionaire entrepreneurs can lend a helping hand to let this cultural heritage stay where it belongs.
"The Japanese have offered high figures for my collection time and again, but I have turned down the offers. These antiques are a manifestation of Chinese culture and once they are lost, it's impossible to recover them," said Wang.
Last year, the collector came across the path of the like-minded Lee Feng-san (李鳳山), founder of Meimen Qigong and Culture Center (梅門一氣流行養生學苑), who has dedicated himself in reviving the ancient Chinese philosophy of self-cultivation through qigong. An unprecedented exhibition has emerged from this new friendship: an exhibition of swords taken from Wang's collection, which will be shown at the center's gallery in Hsinchu later this month.
Entitled The Swords of the Emperor (王者之風), the exhibition features imperial swords from the Qing and Ming Dynasties, as well as swords and daggers dating back as far as the Warring States period (475BC to 221BC).
The Swords of the Emperor is slated to take place at the Meimen Gallery, B1, 192 Tungkuang Rd, Hsinchu City (新竹市東光路192號B1) from June 16 to Sept. 2. For more information, call (03) 574-5874 or visit www.meimen.org.
Growing up in a rural, religious community in western Canada, Kyle McCarthy loved hockey, but once he came out at 19, he quit, convinced being openly gay and an active player was untenable. So the 32-year-old says he is “very surprised” by the runaway success of Heated Rivalry, a Canadian-made series about the romance between two closeted gay players in a sport that has historically made gay men feel unwelcome. Ben Baby, the 43-year-old commissioner of the Toronto Gay Hockey Association (TGHA), calls the success of the show — which has catapulted its young lead actors to stardom -- “shocking,” and says
The 2018 nine-in-one local elections were a wild ride that no one saw coming. Entering that year, the Chinese Nationalist Party (KMT) was demoralized and in disarray — and fearing an existential crisis. By the end of the year, the party was riding high and swept most of the country in a landslide, including toppling the Democratic Progressive Party (DPP) in their Kaohsiung stronghold. Could something like that happen again on the DPP side in this year’s nine-in-one elections? The short answer is not exactly; the conditions were very specific. However, it does illustrate how swiftly every assumption early in an
Inside an ordinary-looking townhouse on a narrow road in central Kaohsiung, Tsai A-li (蔡阿李) raised her three children alone for 15 years. As far as the children knew, their father was away working in the US. They were kept in the dark for as long as possible by their mother, for the truth was perhaps too sad and unjust for their young minds to bear. The family home of White Terror victim Ko Chi-hua (柯旗化) is now open to the public. Admission is free and it is just a short walk from the Kaohsiung train station. Walk two blocks south along Jhongshan
Francis William White, an Englishman who late in the 1860s served as Commissioner of the Imperial Customs Service in Tainan, published the tale of a jaunt he took one winter in 1868: A visit to the interior of south Formosa (1870). White’s journey took him into the mountains, where he mused on the difficult terrain and the ease with which his little group could be ambushed in the crags and dense vegetation. At one point he stays at the house of a local near a stream on the border of indigenous territory: “Their matchlocks, which were kept in excellent order,
RSS