Top 200 Collectors

Wu Tiejun is the founder of the Deji Group, which is behind the Deji Plaza development in Nanjing, China, and consists of a luxury shopping mall, office buildings, and exhibition space for the company’s affiliated nonprofit Deji Art Museum. In 2023, the Nanjinger reported that at least 4.025 billion yuan (around $559 million) has been spent on a forthcoming expansion to Deji Plaza in an effort to make it China’s top shopping mall.

Located on the eighth floor of Deji Plaza’s Phase II building, the Deji Art Museum showcases many of the works that Wu and the Deji Group have purchased over the past several years with a mission of “building a comprehensive art institution and cultural platform that bridges art across cultures and time,” according to its website. Additionally, the nonprofit has plans to open another branch of the museum that is to be designed by Japanese architect Kengo Kuma, who designed the Japan National Stadium in Tokyo for the 2020 Summer Olympics. Located on “the eastern foot of Nanjing’s Zijin Mountain, where rivers and mountains meet and universities cluster,” the new branch is set to open in 2025.

The Deji Art Museum has a collection that spans thousands of years and is divided into three parts: ancient Chinese art, the art of Jinling, and Chinese and international modern and contemporary art. Over the past three decades, the museum has focused on acquiring antiquities—jades, ceramics, furniture, Buddha statues, and more—from as early as the Neolithic period (roughly 4300 BCE to 2000 BCE) up until the Qing dynasty, China’s last imperial dynasty.

Jinling is another name for Nanjing, so naturally being based in Nanjing, the Deji Art Museum has also made it a priority to collect art from the region, with an emphasis on landscape paintings and everyday scenes of Nanjing.

In the Deji Art Museum’s late 19th- and early 20th-century holdings are trophy pieces acquired at auction by the likes of Pablo Picasso, Claude Monet, Piet Mondrian, Paul Cezanne, René Magritte, Georgia O’Keeffe, Zao Wou-ki, and Sanyu. On the contemporary end of the spectrum, the museum owns works by the likes of Andy Warhol, Anselm Kiefer, Jeff Koons, Yayoi Kusama, Kaws, Yoshitomo Nara, Damien Hirst, David Hockney, and Beeple.