People visit the ongoing exhibition Meet Renoir Under Olive Trees in the 798 Art Zone in Beijing. Photos provided to China Daily
Yan Lugen, who is in the real estate business, is known as an avid collector of Western art.
He is believed to have amassed hundreds of works of Pablo Picasso, Claude Monet, Paul Gauguin and Auguste Rodin, among others, over the past decade.
The self-made billionaire is passionate about turning his interest in art into a business. So, two years ago he founded the Baijia Lake International Culture Investment Group, which organizes cultural projects, and the company's core product, as he tells China Daily, is to stage shows of "international art masters" at home.
On July 1, Yan inaugurated his Baijia Lake Art Center Beijing, in the 798 Art Zone, with an exhibition called Meet Renoir Under Olive Trees. It has 45 high-resolution reproductions of the French impressionist artist's works.
The original works were painted in the last 20 years of the artist's life, which were spent at Les Collettes, a farm full of olive trees.
