Alan Lo ticks all the boxes that define a millennial art collector in Asia. Hailing from a prominent Hong Kong family and endowed with an entrepreneurial can-do spirit, he launched fashionable restaurants, capitalized on lucky investments in the tech sector, and began buying contemporary art in 2010, as Instagram was launched and international galleries and art fair owners started to pay attention to the Asian market.

I first met Lo in 2008 at a dinner that he hosted just after he and two business partners, founders of the restaurant firm Classified Group, opened The Pawn, a British-style restaurant in a late-19th-century pawnshop—a dilapidated but architecturally exquisite East-meets-West heritage building in Wan Chai. They had restored the space, employing craftspeople to recreate the terrazzo flooring found in many interiors of the period. They also covered the walls with Hong Kong artist Tsang Kin-Wah’s profane William Morris-inspired wallpaper, which commingles British and Chinese obscenities.