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Olyvia Kwok

Olyvia Kwok was born in Beijng and privately educated in the UK from the age of twelve onwards. She graduated in pure mathematics and statistics from Queen Mary, University of London, at the aged of 20, and later took an MA at the British Museum, specialising in 15th-century Chinese Southern School paintings.

At the age of 22 she became an art dealer, accompanying her godfather Conor Mahony (a former vice president of the Chinese department at Sotheby’s until he became president of The Chinese Porcelain Company in New York in 1994) on visits to sellers in the United States and joining him in some small starter deals. Her first coup came when she acquired a Chinese scroll painting from a small auction house, with a bid of $30,000, splitting the purchase price fifty-fifty with Mahony. Kwok’s hunch that it was older than advertised, and therefore undervalued, paid off when it fetched $220,000 at auction in Hong Kong.

Within a couple of years, Kwok was introduced to the CFO of a private bank in Geneva (she is contractually restrained from identifying which one), who was about to create a fund for alternative assets as part of a larger hedge fund. The bank had allocated $25 million to this fund, but Kwok persuaded him to increase this limit gradually to $50 million, on the grounds that the more money the fund had to play with, the larger the market space it would have for dealing in the big names. “With more money to hand, one can control the market much better,” she says.

For nine months Kwok concentrated on buying Chinese art, not because of her own native origins, but because she perceived that China was a strong market, with a strong middle class and a proud, historically-minded culture. She also bought art in Japan, Korea, India, Pakistan, Russia, and the Middle East.

Having “got burned” with her holdings of Middle Eastern art, leaving it too long before she sold up, Kwok learnt the valuable lesson that when investing in art it is better to turn stock quickly, thereby reducing risk, than to be a buy-and-hold operator.

At the beginning of 2008 Kwok arranged the sale of about 25 per cent of the fund’s art holdings to Lehman Brothers, while the Geneva bank kept back about 15 per cent of the portfolio. The remaining 60 per cent we sold to individuals through auctions and private placements, including one sale of 20 pieces in a single auction.

Over an 18-month period, the Geneva bank’s alternative assets fund made an IRR of 213 per cent.

For the next few years she devoted all her energy to Olyvia Oriental, her gallery in St. James’s, London, which she had opened back in 2005 because she did not want to rely solely on the Geneva bank’s art fund. In 2009 she decided to rebrand herself as Olyvia Fine Art, partly because Oriental art and art from emerging markets had fallen back. She was obliged to dump items she had bought for $1 million plus commission, which taught her an invaluable lesson: never hold too much stock or become over-leveraged.

The other important lesson she learned from “my 2009 meltdown”, as she calls it, was that she was in the business of selling artists, not art.

She also learned the importance of understanding trends and the wider marketplace. Subsequently, she benefited from the upturn in prices of Impressionist and Modern Masters paintings and drawings, and was one of the first dealers to identify the growing interest in American Pop Art, especially Andy Warhol.

“I was lucky to be exposed to art from an early age in an objective way," says Kwok. "I have a good eye and sense of texture, and yet I have a mathematical mind, so I’m able to see things more clinically.

“I’m not a natural gallerist. A gallery needs a programme, representative events, shows, and fairs. A gallerist is a trend-maker; a gallerist has to put a show out, or make a commitment to young artists. I prefer to concentrate on doing deals.”

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