Lisa Young and Steven Abraham

Collectors, New York

Husband-and-wife duo Lisa Young and Steve Abraham are striving to create a collection with global resonance, with a particular focus on artists from the Asian diaspora. Abraham, who works in tech, grew up in Indonesia before locating to the United States in his teens, while Young is a design consultant, born and raised in New York to Japanese and Korean parents. The Brooklyn-based couple aim to support the artists they collect by raising awareness of their practices, in part through a website dedicated to their collection. In 2021, the pair collaborated with fellow collector Dan Nguyen to establish The Here and There Collective (THAT Co.): a non-profit organisation dedicated to supporting artists from the Asian diaspora, which hosts a digital archive, gives grants to early career artists and mounts exhibitions and events. Young and Abraham seek to promote greater equity in the market by encouraging the inclusion of resale clauses when they acquire a work, from right of first refusal to royalty and profit share. Aïda Muluneh’s Fragments (2016) was the first work they bought for their collection, which now includes works by the likes of Dominique Fung, Sasha Gordon and Maia Cruz Palileo.

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