Why prints matter most in Eden Xu-Martinez’s collection
For Eden Xu-Martinez, the appeal of collecting has never been limited to scale or prestige. The New York–based collector, patron, and philanthropist has built a home collection in Columbus Circle that places prints and works on paper at its center, alongside paintings by artists including Pat Steir, Alberto Giacometti, Andreas Gursky, Louise Bourgeois, and David Hockney. The apartment, which overlooks Central Park, reflects a collector’s eye shaped as much by memory as by market access.
Xu-Martinez founded the Eden Arts Foundation, a nonprofit that supports contemporary artists and curators, and is an active member of the Guggenheim Museum and The Museum of Modern Art (MoMA). But her relationship to printmaking began earlier, during her studies in art administration at Columbia University, where a lithography elective changed the way she thought about the medium. Prints, she came to see, offered a rare combination: formal seriousness without the sense that collecting was reserved for a narrow elite.
That idea took root after a childhood in Hong Kong, where she encountered contemporary art only intermittently, through local exhibitions and museum visits while traveling. The city’s art landscape shifted in the early 2010s, when galleries such as Gagosian opened there and she and her husband, Steve, began attending openings, dinners, and repeated visits. The more they learned, the more they felt ready to buy.
Their first acquisitions were telling. One of the earliest was Andreas Gursky’s Hong Kong Shanghai Bank II (2020), a large-scale photograph of the HSBC building at night that echoes the view from Steve’s former office. Another was Louise Bourgeois’s Twosome (2005), a small print of two red chairs that Xu-Martinez bought as a Christmas gift after remembering the red chairs at Pacific Coffee in Hong Kong, where the couple used to sit together early in their relationship.
That personal register remains central to the collection. Xu-Martinez has said that learning about the artists behind the works is one of the most rewarding parts of collecting, and that prints are “a bridge between authorship and accessibility.” In her apartment, that philosophy is visible in the dialogue between Bourgeois, Hockney, Giacometti, and Vian Sora, whose Tamarisk (Purification) (2025–26) will hang opposite the Bourgeois print.
For Xu-Martinez, prints are not a secondary category. They are the medium through which collecting becomes intimate, informed, and possible.
