John Dodelande is a prolific businessman and collector. An entrepreneur since his twenties, his first ventures were in the fashion and textiles. Dodelande subsequently invested in agricultural land in the Caucasus region, where he diversified into food-processing. He created a base in the republic of Georgia, where his latest ambitious project is to create modern real-estate infrastructure in the environs of Tbilisi Airport –– hotels, gas stations, parking and restaurants. In 2013, the President of Georgia granted Dodelande Georgian citizenship for exceptional services to the country.

John Dodelande is a prolific businessman and collector. An entrepreneur since his twenties, his first ventures were in the fashion and textiles. Dodelande subsequently invested in agricultural land in the Caucasus region, where he diversified into food-processing. He created a base in the republic of Georgia, where his latest ambitious project is to create modern real-estate infrastructure in the environs of Tbilisi Airport –– hotels, gas stations, parking and restaurants. In 2013, the President of Georgia granted Dodelande Georgian citizenship for exceptional services to the country. Dodelande’s career as a collector has developed in parallel with his business activities. He travelled to China early on in his career, and became deeply interested in that country’s ancient and much misunderstood visual culture. He began to collect works by Chinese artists of the post-Mao generation, the cohort that came to maturity in the 1980s and after. These artists were witnesses of the transformation of China – the super-rapid modernisation, the explosive economic growth, the opening of borders – and they have explored its human effects in their art. Some of those artists use or adapt traditional means such as ink or oils, others have enthusiastically embraced conceptual art and new media. For all the dizzying diversity of their practise, the artists share a rootedness in their native culture, a global outlook, an incisive and challenging creative approach.  In all his business and collecting, Dodelande aims to build commercial and cultural bridges, to forge links between continental Europe, the Caucasus, the countries of Central Asia, and China. He sees his activity as a contemporary analogue of the ancient Silk Road, the network of trade routes that allowed for a flow of goods and ideas and innovation between East to West. His pro-active attitude to collecting is part of that wider project: he lends to exhibitions and museums, stages art events of his own: sponsors books, monographs and video. Dodelande is co-author (with Adrian Cheng) of a major survey of the contemporary scene: ‘Chinese Art: The Impossible Collection’, and he is the founder of a patrons’ group dedicated to Chinese contemporary art at Le Musée de l’Art Moderne de la Ville in Paris, his native city. Dodelande is also a keen mountaineer who has climbed some of the highest and most remote peaks in the world – among them, the Carstensz Pyramid in New Guinea, Mount Damavand in Iran, and Mount Sidley in Antarctica.