Culture as a bridge

Lady Linda Wong Davies founded the KT Wong Foundation in memory of her father, a Chinese Malaysian entrepreneur, with a mission she describes as a two-way highway, carrying culture into China and out of it. Over nearly two decades its projects have included a Mandarin Coriolanus at the Edinburgh Festival, with two rock bands standing in for the battle scenes, and the National Theatre's Frankenstein on Chinese cinema screens after three and a half years of trying to satisfy the censors. She chose Frankenstein because its questions about invention and ethics matched China's own industrial revolution, and familiar names helped. When the screenings were announced, demand crashed the British Council's website. Wong Davies prefers the word fusion to blend, and her productions show what she means. She asked the artist Zhang Huan, who had never been to an opera, to direct and design Handel's Semele around a reconstructed 500-year-old Ming temple.

When Michael Macfarlane asks whether culture could make today's shift in global power less destructive than past transitions, her answer is direct.

Seriously, what changes people's mindsets? What changes people's heart? It's not through a set of demographics or graphs or statistics. It's cultural platforms.

— Lady Linda Wong Davies, Wealth Office

Wong Davies argues that cultural exchange cannot be done through layers of bureaucracy, and that patrons need passion, conviction and pragmatism about legacy. She stresses empathy for the audience and stories with universal resonance over big names. Her production of Britten's Noah's Flood, staged with Chinese lanterns carried by children, rested on a belief that reaching children reaches their parents and grandparents too.

Soft power that grows on its own

Keyu Jin, the economist and author of The New China Playbook, distinguishes organic soft power from state-led efforts. She sees China entering the phase Japan and Korea passed through, as wealth turns creativity towards making life more enjoyable, and reads the Labubu phenomenon as a reflection of a creative, consumption-minded Gen Z that is willing to borrow.

And the new generation, there's just so much more commonality between the Gen Zs around the world than there is across the older generations. They care about animal rights, social inequity, the planet.

— Keyu Jin, Wealth Office

Pearl Lam, a gallerist who has spent more than two decades bridging Chinese and Western contemporary art, sees a related shift in collecting. Many young heirs in North America and Western Europe, she says, want experiences and do not want the cost and responsibility of inherited collections. Young people she meets in China, the rest of Asia and the Middle East want to build collections, driven by a passion for their culture and for cultural exchange. She also recalls the scholarly tradition of the treasure room, where collectors once shared scrolls and jade over tea. The Chinese market, in her account, is still dominated by antiquities, classical painting and modern ink painting, with contemporary art very small, while collectors under 40 favour international art, often out of social pressure and a wish to belong to an international crowd.

How collectors confer legitimacy

If culture is capital, guests agree that people confer its value. Catherine Freeman, an authority on the secondary art market, argues that collectors are central to legitimacy. A work chosen with intent, placed in a museum or held in a recognised collection carries more weight at sale than one chosen at random, and the story a collector builds becomes part of the value of each work within the collection.

It's not only a social investment when you're investing in art, it's more of a civilizational investment.

— Catherine Freeman, Wealth Office

Lam makes a parallel argument. Supply and demand matter, she says, but value also needs credentials, which today come from museum collections, museum exhibitions and important private collections. Without them, she suggests, art resembles NFT speculation, which has not recovered because nothing supported it. Bigna Pfenninger, who defines the secondary market as every work resold after its first owner, including the work of living artists, adds that patronage depends on an ecosystem close to home, where collectors meet artists, dealers and institutions. Financial capacity alone does not create a market, in her view. She cites Singapore as a city with the transactional machinery in place that is still building the appetite and habit of studio visits a secondary market needs.

Art as asset and as purpose

Guests are careful about the financial case. Freeman describes blue-chip works as ballast, like gold bars in a safe, that frees a collector to be more playful elsewhere. Pfenninger judges the best collections as those where the sum is larger than the parts. Howard Bilton, a collector who co-founded the Sovereign Art Foundation, calls the art market soft and warns that most art has no resale value, even as his foundation turns art prizes into funding for art therapy for vulnerable children. Lam urges young collectors to be honest about whether they collect for investment, social pressure or passion. Pfenninger describes the very top of the market as a scarcity market of about 2,500 trophy works, traded quietly among very few buyers.

Macfarlane framed the series around wealth flowing into creativity and the arts in ways he describes as unprecedented. These conversations suggest why. For Wong Davies the purpose is understanding, and she argues that beyond material needs it is the soul that needs feeding. For Jin, a generation's shared concerns may make a rival easier to understand. For Freeman and Lam, collectors and institutions confer legitimacy that price alone does not supply. Each treats culture as a form of capital whose returns are measured partly in influence and understanding.