Obituary: Budi Tek (1957–2022)
By HG Masters
Portrait of BUDI TEK. Courtesy Yuz Museum, Shanghai.
After a long battle with pancreatic cancer, Budiardjo “Budi” Tek, the Chinese-Indonesian industrialist and art collector behind the Yuz Foundation and Yuz Museum in Shanghai, died on March 18 in Hong Kong at the age of 65. Tek was known for his collection of more than 1,500 artworks, including many large-scale installations by international artists such as Maurizio Cattelan and Adel Abdessemed, as well as works by famed Chinese artists who rose to prominence in the 1980s and ’90s, including Xu Bing, Wang Guangyi, Qiu Anxiong, Zhang Xiaogang, Fang Lijun, and Ai Weiwei.
Born in Jakarta and raised in Singapore, Tek ran a successful company in the poultry-farming industry. He began collecting art in 2004. Three years later, he founded Yuz Foundation and opened the first Yuz Museum in Jakarta in 2008 with the aim to facilitate cultural exchanges between China and Southeast Asia.
As his collection of large-scale installations grew, Tek made plans for a museum in China, initially called De Museum, with a hotel and conference center, in Shanghai’s Jiading District. This vision never materialized. However, aligning with Shanghai’s ambitions to transform the riverside area of the Xuhui District into the West Bund cultural corridor, Tek ultimately settled on leasing a former airplane hangar of the original Longhua Airport, which was renovated and redesigned by Sou Foujimoto. The Yuz Museum opened in 2014 with more than 9,000-square-meters of gallery space and Cattelan’s untitled olive tree growing in a giant cube of earth, a permanent feature of the glass-box lobby along with bamboo groves. The opening exhibition, “Myth / History: Yuz Collection of Contemporary Art,” curated by Chinese art scholar Wu Hung, the chair of the academic committee of Yuz Museum, featured a sculpture by Zhang Huan as well as installations by Huang Yongping and Yoshitomo Nara, who built a small house replicating his studio for the exhibition.
After learning of his pancreatic cancer in 2015, Tek began his campaign to transform Yuz Museum into a nonprofit public museum run by a foundation in China. However, his lobbying efforts were ultimately rebuffed. Instead, Tek began seeking out other means of preserving his collection. In 2018, Yuz Museum announced plans for a joint foundation with the Los Angeles County Museum of Art (LACMA) to ensure the longevity of his collection and the museum. Later in 2019, Qatar Museums joined an exhibition partnership with Yuz Museum and LACMA, separate from the foundation, to share touring shows. Recently, on March 7, LACMA announced that Tek had donated seven of the artworks in LACMA’s exhibition “Legacies of Exchange: Chinese Contemporary Art from the Yuz Foundation,” including paintings by Zhou Tiehai and Yu Youhan, a Qiu Anxiong installation, and Ai Weiwei’s Circle of Animals/Zodiac Heads (2011), to the American museum. Inspired by his Christian beliefs, Tek told an interviewer in 2013 that he hoped the Yuz Museum would “help foster [an] interest in the arts and take them to a higher form of living.”
Tek also established the charity Art Creates Cures, a partnership aiding research into pancreatic cancer, with Sotheby’s, John Hopkins University, and many art patrons. Tek was named an Officer of the Legion of Honor of France in 2017 and was an Asia-Pacific member and collector member at Tate Britain.
