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Metropolitan Museum of Art
Photo: Rudy Sulgan / Getty Images
125 million dollars for art: this sum, the equivalent of around 110 million euros, went to the Metropolitan Museum of Art.
The donation from the investor Oscar Tang and his wife Agnes Hsu-Tang is the highest private gift of money in the more than 150-year history of the museum, announced the New York house.
With the donation, the renowned museum will renovate its exhibition rooms for modern and contemporary art and expand it into a wing of around 7500 square meters, named after the couple.
"The redesign of the exhibition rooms will enable the museum to show art of the 20th and 21st centuries from a global, all-encompassing, courageous and surprising perspective," said the Austrian museum director Max Hollein.
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Agnes Hsu-Tang and Oscar Tang: "We find that the Metropolitan Museum of Art is an exemplary guardian and presenter of the artistic heritage across cultures and times"
Photo: Mike Coppola / Getty Images
Oscar Tang has been a long-time supporter of the museum and reportedly financed curatorial positions and special exhibitions, and donated wings in memory of family members.
There were also numerous donations, for example 20 Chinese paintings from the 11th to 18th centuries.
"As a little boy I was displaced by the war, and America gave me refuge, education and the opportunity to be successful," Tang is quoted as saying.
"I joined the Met Board of Directors almost 30 years ago and wanted to share the riches of my Chinese heritage with America and the world."
Academic centers for Asian humanities were also set up after donations from the Tangs, for example at Princeton University, Columbia University, the University of California at Berkeley and the University of Oxford. At the beginning of 2021 they founded the campaign “The Yellow Whistle” to combat racially motivated violence against people who read Asian, which has increased significantly in the wake of the corona crisis.
Tang, who was born in Shanghai, was sent to school in America at the age of 11 after his family fled to Hong Kong during the communist revolution.
Before him, Tang's father and grandfather had been educated in the United States before they became leading figures in politics, business and society in China.
Tang is a co-founder of an asset management company.
In 1994 he became the first American of Asian descent to be appointed to the Board of Trustees of the Met.
Agnes Hsu-Tang is an archaeologist and art historian who has advised Unesco and former US President Barack Obama on issues such as saving cultural assets.
From 2014 to July 2021, Hsu-Tang was executive director on the board of the Metropolitan Opera.
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