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Like auction houses, Lévy Gorvy, a New York-headquartered gallery co-founded by Dominique Lévy and Brett Gorvy in 2016, mainly deals in the secondary market, where the trend in recent years is more art changing hands in the discreet back rooms of private dealers, away from the limelight of public auctions.

However, nobody is selling a lot of art these days because of the Covid-19 pandemic. According to the Art Basel and UBS art market survey published earlier this month, galleries sold 36 per cent less in the first half of the year compared with the same period in 2019. Those in Greater China were suffering the most, with sales down 55 per cent.

Wei is adamant that she left the auctions business at just the right time. “Many collectors have to cash in artworks to pump money back into their businesses, and they certainly don’t want the world to know their businesses are out of money,” she says.

Given that Lévy Gorvy mainly deals in works that sell for more than a million US dollars, it only needs a small handful of very wealthy people to keep buying to do well, Wei says. “This is a niche market. We are not like the auction houses. They need mass.”

When she left her cushy position at Christie’s after just two years, insiders said it was because she was not happy being sidelined from the day-to-day running of the business, which was handed over to new arrival Francis Belin, who was appointed as Asia president. She confirms this, saying she left because she was “bored”.

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“After I was promoted to chairman six years after I joined Christie’s, I just became a super-salesperson. I wasn’t creating anything new any more,” she says. A former McKinsey management consultant, she wanted to be somewhere where she could rewrite the rules. That’s why she swapped a 254-year-old establishment for a five-year-old start-up, she adds, where her knowledge of Asian demand for art can be put to more creative use.

She also compared the handling of the pandemic crisis by the world‘s two biggest auction houses.

“I think Charles Stewart [the CEO of Sotheby’s] had the right strategy for the pandemic. It was brutal. He immediately cut staff to stop the bleeding, and he gave power to each region to make their own contingency plans. That was very important. Christie’s waited until June to lay people off. It was a bit late,” she says.

Despite her confidence in demand from the ultra-wealthy for art, there are a lot of uncertainties ahead, especially in Hong Kong, where Lévy Gorvy opened its first Asia gallery in March 2019.

Wei, who was born in mainland China, says she feels a great sorrow about Hong Kong, the city where she built her career. She spent much of the past year in the US, where her 14-year-old daughter has just started boarding school and where Wei was a consultant at Harvard University’s Chinese Art Media Lab, before she spent some time off in the UK.

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“When I left [Hong Kong] last July, I did not think that the city would become so divided. Now, mainland Chinese people do not feel safe speaking Mandarin on the streets,” she says.

Is she worried Chinese money will no longer pour into Hong Kong in huge quantities, thus undermining the city’s position as an art market?

“I think the money will still come to Hong Kong. If not, then I will go up [to mainland China],” she says. “Auctions need people to come here. Galleries don’t.”

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