Businessman, collector, gallerist, artist – Kim Chang-il is something of a Renaissance man, maybe even a mini-artworld all of his own (as if to acknowledge this, the last London show of his own works was titled CI Kim – Myself). The fifty-eight-year-old Korean, chairman of a transport company, a chain of 14 restaurants and the Arario department store, also owns the Arario Gallery in Cheonan, South Chungcheong Province, which, since it opened in 2002, has been dedicated to supporting the careers of the country’s emerging artists. In 2005 Kim opened a sister gallery in Beijing, which has a similar mission with respect to Chinese art. While rival gallerists may complain about Kim flexing his financial muscles to lure artists to the Arario fold, there is no doubting the seriousness of his enterprise. He is also a devoted collector of Western art, and among the several thousand works he owns is Damien Hirst’s Hymn (1996), bought in 2004 for $2 million, and Charity (2003) – the 22-foot-high, six-ton bronze based on a Spastics Society collection box. The collection, often set up as a rival to Charles Saatchi’s BritArt holdings, also includes works by Tracey Emin, Mona Hatoum, Marc Quinn, Antony Gormley and others. When he’s not shopping at White Cube, Kim (who didn’t train as an artist) makes his own works, describing his artistic persona, CI Kim, as ‘a dragonfly with dreams of chirruping like a cicada’. We couldn’t have put it better ourselves.