MoMA’s purchase includes some of the most influential artists to emerge in the 1990s, including Rong Rong, Huang Yan and Ai Weiwei. China’s rapid industrialization is one of their topics.

While prices for Chinese contemporary art have soared in the past five years, U.S. museums have been slow to add the works. Last year the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York purchased Hai Bo’s “Bicycle Riders From the Series ‘The North,”’ a 2005 group of eight wall-size images of men riding bicycles.

MoMA’s acquisition has ruffled some art-world feathers because the seller was not the usual dealer, but Larry Warsh, 49, who published the exhibition guide Museums for 10 years until 2004, when he sold it to Louise MacBain’s media company.

In 2002, Walsh hired a Beijing-based art historian and curator, Karen Smith, to help him target important Chinese artists. He bought in bulk, snapping up studio contents, often for rock-bottom prices. Warsh said he invited MoMA’s photography curators to select images stored at his New York warehouse.

He now owns “500 plus” photographs, besides a valuable cache of paintings and sculptures. Works for which he paid between US$500 and US$5,000 now fetch US$5,000 to US$20,000.

According to Warsh, MoMA paid 30 percent to 40 percent below retail price and received five donated images by Weng Fen, Zhang Dali and Zheng Guogu. MoMA declined to comment on the price.

Warsh credits his father-in-law, collector Howard Farber, for getting him interested in Chinese art. Farber spent all of US$2 million buying Chinese art starting in 1995, sold some of his collection at auction this past year for a satisfying US$20.4 million.

Warsh has plowed some of his own profits into a new exhibition and lecture space in Chelsea. Designer Clodagh gave the gallery a minimalist touch.

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