Hong Kong Gallerist Pascal de Sarthe Is Championing Young Artists in Asia

Pascal de Sarthe has always been one to challenge the status quo. A seasoned dealer with a fervor for emerging art, he has worked across three continents—Europe, North America, and Asia—during a five-decade career. His journey in the art world began with an escape from boarding school as a teenager, which took him through the Parisian art scene, San Francisco, and Arizona. This winding path culminated with the establishment of his flagship Hong Kong gallery in 2010.

DE SARTHE is today a leading name in the Hong Kong art market. Positioned in the heart of the city’s art district in Wong Chuk Hang, the gallery is focused on cultivating a new wave of artists by prioritizing engagement and innovation. This mission is bolstered by the DE SARTHE Residency (deSAR), an annual summer program launched in 2017, currently hosting 32-year-old Chinese artist Liao Jiaming.

The gallery is a family affair. De Sarthe’s son, Vincent, still maintains a presence in the United States, having reopened the gallery’s satellite location in Scottsdale, Arizona in 2022.

Today, de Sarthe believes the art industry must nurture a generation of younger artists and shield their work from speculative market fluctuations. “The speculative nature of the art market often pressures young artists to produce commercially viable work rather than allowing them to freely explore their creative vision,” de Sarthe said. In Hong Kong, his renewed mission is to support a growing crop of young artists, around 30 years old or younger, who feel free to break boundaries.

As a child, de Sarthe could not wait to get home from boarding school to draw. He bought a book by the French painter Chaïm Soutine and started painting as much as possible. In rural France, he dreamed of becoming an artist in the United States. “I told everybody, like a little pretentious guy in a little village, that I will be living in America, and so that’s really when art became part of me,” he recalled.

And so, as an inspiring artist in his teens, he escaped from boarding school, and instead of returning home, he left for Paris to pursue his dream. In 1978, when he was in his early twenties, a friend offered him a space in a shopping mall. There, he’d sell his friends’ art, work by French avant-garde artists, and even a show of his own work. While admittedly unprofitable, the venture would be a kickstart for the young dealer.

Aged 23, after his daughter was born, de Sarthe took a leap of faith and fulfilled his dream of moving to the U.S., upping sticks to San Francisco with just $1,700 in his account. Then, in 1981, he brought his namesake gallery to the United States, where he sold Impressionist works by Camille Pissarro, Paul Cézanne, and Mary Cassatt.

When de Sarthe arrived in San Francisco, he started from scratch. He sold paintings on the street or around the neighborhood, slowly attracting a clientele that would support his first permanent gallery space in Union Square. There, he held shows of modern masters and Impressionists, including a 1982 group exhibition featuring works by Cézanne, Vincent van Gogh, and Claude Monet.

But the young gallerist would not rest on his laurels. His ambitions soon took him to Japan, where he would forge a friendship with Susumu Yamamoto, the influential director of Fuji TV Gallery. Under Yamamoto’s mentorship, de Sarthe became well-connected in the Japanese art market, where he sold historical Western art.

At the same time, he recalled that his “love of contemporary art came back,” inspiring him to curate an exhibition of works by Dennis Oppenheim that formed part of the artist’s installation at the 1988 Seoul Olympics. As de Sarthe picked up momentum throughout the ’80s, a growing fascination with Asian art would lead to him bringing contemporary Chinese artists like Zao Wou-ki and Chu Teh-chun and Japanese artists like Tatsuo Miyajima, Toshikatsu Endo, and Tadashi Kawamata to California. “I thought being in America, in California, was being in the center of the world,” de Sarthe told Artsy from his office in Hong Kong.

In 1990, the gallerist relocated to Los Angeles with a keen focus on prioritizing contemporary art. Early solo presentations at the space included shows for Helmut Newton, Jochen Gerz, and Alain Jacquet. However, the time in L.A. was short-lived, and de Sarthe once again left town, this time moving to Scottsdale, Arizona.

“I always loved Arizona,” he said. “I love Scottsdale, Paradise Valley, Phoenix area. I like the landscape, I like nature. My wife and I like the light in Arizona, and I like the pace. I like the peace. At the time, it was 600,000 people in the old metropolitan. Now it’s over 5 million.”

De Sarthe moved to Arizona to raise his children, and his gallery grew alongside the Southwestern city. Yet, the connections he had developed in Asia kept pulling his business to the cultural centers across the Pacific Ocean. In 2010, he made another leap, this time opening in Hong Kong.

“I wanted to restart, not in contemporary,” he said of the initial endeavor. Building from the gallery’s roots in the classics, de Sarthe would establish the Hong Kong gallery as a beacon for museum-quality exhibitions featuring hallowed names from Auguste Rodin to Robert Indiana.

“I believe that if you have a real understanding of what our history is and an artist’s body of work, you definitely will understand what quality stands for and what it is, so I have always been looking for that,” de Sarthe said. “The classic work—I get a lot of pleasure doing it.”

As de Sarthe spent more time in Hong Kong, he became enthralled by a new and exciting generation of artists from the region. Many of them, he noted, were incorporating new technologies—and he wanted to support them. “I wanted to be part of that conversation,” he stated.

“I met young artists that were pushing boundaries, who were doing different things that responded to a question asked by art history in the past, but also positioning themselves into the future,” he recalled. These artists were “bringing back the avant-garde in the conversation, but in the process, using new technologies…and commenting on how, as humans, we are going to evolve within this new technology.”

With his Hong Kong space, de Sarthe hopes to nurture the careers and communities of these artists. He quickly developed a reputation for platforming boundary-pushing art from a roster that now boasts 20 contemporary names, such as Caison Wang and Mak2.

A dealer with extensive experience in both the primary and secondary sides of the art market, de Sarthe looks at aspects of today’s art world with a degree of skepticism. He’s against what he describes as the speculative aspects of the market. “This narrows the public’s interest and makes it very difficult for emerging or lesser-known artists to break into the market,” he said.

Instead, de Sarthe’s approach is inspired by his passion for understanding how art interacts with art history. He draws inspiration from storied gallery models such as Marian Goodman Gallery and Castelli Gallery, which, he notes, prioritize building long-term legacies and collector bases for their artists. De Sarthe noted Leo Castelli as a key mentor: “I learned a lot from Leo Castelli because you need to create a market for [the artists], and you want a healthy market,” he said.