Tuesday May 19
This is our first time in Hong Kong. We love the airport. There is no advertising. We cannot abide airports with shops. But here it's all very clean and very empty – and there is a bloody big Rolls-Royce waiting for us outside. Why? Suzanne Page, who used to run the Museum of Modern Art in Paris, did a huge show of ours some years ago and told us she was advising a private French collector called Bernard Arnault. We had no idea what the name meant. We always regarded “Class War, Militant, Gateway” to be a sleeping masterpiece from 1986 and Suzanne persuaded us to part with it. Then someone asked if we would like to go to Hong Kong, as Arnault was going to show his private collection, including our piece, and Frank Gehry was going with a model of a new art gallery in Paris that would be a permanent home for our picture. Later we found out all this had a connection with handbags.
We thought: “Who is the patron saint of handbags?” Margaret Thatcher! And who wrote about handbags? Oscar Wilde. So to us this was Arnault, Wilde and Thatcher combined; politics, art, fashion and culture.