This Investment Banker Doesn’t Care if You ‘Don’t Get’ His Art Collection

It definitely doesn’t look like an investment banker’s apartment. In Paul Leong’s Tribeca home, there’s a three-foot-long plastic army tank mounted above his bedroom door and, leading up to it, tread tracks embedded in the wall. “We had to channel the wall, put plaster in, run the tank through the plaster, and then refinish the wall,” Leong says proudly. The tank and tracks are an artwork by the conceptual artist Lutz Bacher and one of the more accessible pieces of the 30-plus works of art on display in Leong’s home. A nearby wall features a duct-taped Dr. Martens shoebox with a peephole by the artist Ryan Gander; inside is an overturned chair and a tiny velvet rope. Then there’s the gleaming faucet from the artist collective Bernadette Corporation. Etched into its chrome surface is the ungrammatical sentence “I wanna see your inside of her vagina.”

Unlike many Wall Streeters who collect art, Leong started early. He’s 38; just 10 percent of contemporary collectors are younger than 40, according to the 2014 edition of Larry’s List, a collector report. Leong is also going about it differently than the typical financier. Most collectors gravitate toward pieces by recognizable names that look good on a wall. Leong has amassed more than 70 works that are conceptual or “difficult”—objects that often require lengthy explanation to understand, let alone appreciate. “I’ve known him for about three years, and in that time he’s already built an ambitious, challenging collection,” says Peter Currie, a dealer at Berlin’s Galerie Buchholz, which has sold Leong several works. Leong is building a reputation as a collector who’s younger than anyone more established—and more established than anyone younger.