Rudy Tseng has come to play a defining role in contemporary Asian art. With a background in advertising and the film industry — he retired as head of Walt Disney International, Taiwan, in December 2005 — he is now a collector and respected curator based in Taiwan. He also sits on Tate’s Asia-Pacific Acquisitions Committee and is a member of Tokyo’s Mori Art Museum, as well as of various international art fair advisory groups — from ArtHK and Art Fair Tokyo to the new Taipei Dangdai, which opens next week.

“There is no history of collecting art in my family,” he says cheerfully from his home in a suburb of Taipei. “It was a traditional bourgeois upbringing, but there was not even enough money to pay for the education of all four of us.” At high school and university, his interest was as much in new poetry as it was in contemporary art, although he visited museums and galleries at weekends and devoured artists’ monographs.

While friends were enthralled with cars and fashion brands, he chose to save to buy works of art. His first purchase, made at auction when he was in his early thirties, was a painting by the now New York-based octogenarian Chinese artist Chuang Che, one of the first members of the Fifth Moon Group founded in 1957 and at the forefront of the modern art movement in Taiwan. His art could be said to combine the traditions of Chinese calligraphy and literati painting with western abstraction.