“It’s nice to come home to Shanghai,” the Chinese billionaire Liu Yiqian told me one day in February, four months after gaining worldwide notoriety by spending a hundred and seventy million dollars on a painting by Amedeo Modigliani. We had just sat down in his office at the Long Museum West, one of two privately run art museums that he has opened in the city, when his face contorted and a sneeze of atomic force burst out, unhindered by tissue or hand. Liu unself-consciously wiped himself down with a Kleenex, cleared his sinuses copiously, and balled up the tissue, placing it on a glass coffee table between us. Then he returned to the subject of his home town: “It might not have a long history, this city, but it is…
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The New Yorker (Digital) - 1 Issue, November 7, 2016