Chinese Indonesian collector Budi Tek projects a calm focused manner when speaking, but it doesn’t take long before one gets a sense of his extraordinary enthusiasm for contemporary art and his ambitious plans for his various international institutions. At the Yuz Museum, for example, his private institution in Shanghai, on the schedule are a Giacometti show, a collaboration with Jeffrey Deitch, and an installation of the Rain Room.
He shrugged off the standard questions about how he got started and which artists he initially collected because he would rather focus on the future and the numerous innovative new projects he has in the works.
Tek’s recently opened Yuz Museum in West Bund in Shanghai’s Xuhui District is already on its second exhibition, “Myth/History II: Shanghai Galaxy,” the second of a series organized by the museum’s curator Wu Hung.
Wu is the founder and director of the Center for the Art of East Asia at the University of Chicago. This iteration of the show features work by Maurizio Cattelan, Liang Shaoji, Zhang Enli, and Zhang Jianjun.
Next up is a focus on photographer Yang Fudong, who Tek said was an important part of the “Shanghai Galaxy” show.
Tek is also excited about showing off a major new acquisition, the now famous Rain Room by Random International, “a large-scale environment of perpetually falling water that ceases to pour wherever a person walks.”
Rain Room was a huge hit at the Museum of Modern Art when shown there in 2013, and Tek expects a similar enthusiastic response when it goes on view in September.
Tek says he also plans to work with Jeffrey Deitch on an ambitious show for 2017 called “Overpop.” Though Deitch would not confirm this to artnet News, he told the New York Times reporter Deborah Sontag about his plans for the show in a lengthy profile this past October. According to the story, Deitch “is scouting for a suitably cavernous warehouse in which to install a survey of artists he plans to call ‘Overpop.’ The show will include Cory Arcangel, Ryan Trecartin, Klara Liden, Kathryn Andrews, among others: a generation of mix-masters who are extending the spirit of Pop art into the digital realm.”
Tek is also in the process of creating what will be known as “Budi Desa,” meaning “Budi Village,” in Bali, Indonesia. He explained that land must be bought piecemeal in Indonesia, so he has slowly been acquiring parcels to create his art-filled village for roughly the past two decades. Tek says when the Rain Room eventually goes there, on permanent view, it will be “Rain Room in the Rain Forest.”