Walters started teaching French at the Hong Kong International School and German Swiss International School, and gave birth to two boys, Chad and Todd. Then, one day, she met Josette Bertrou, a Frenchwoman whose family represented the Parisian art gallery Vision Nouvelle in Japan.
They decided it would be a good idea to stage exhibitions of European lithographs and etchings because so little art was being shown in Hong Kong then, Walters said in a 2013 interview for the “Hong Kong Art History Research” pilot project.
The art market in the 1970s was far from booming, unlike today. Walters and Bertrou registered their business, Arts Promotion, in 1973, the year of the global oil crisis.
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They focused on affordable limited edition prints from France and the UK, and later, original works on paper. But sometimes, they managed to put on quite the blockbuster show – there was one exhibition with works by Picasso, Miro and Chagall, she said.
These drew the attention of Hong Kong artists such as Wucius Wong, Luis Chan and Leung Kui-ting. Later, when Walters became an art consultant to major corporations, she became one of the first to place Hong Kong art with large, multinational companies.There was a time when Walters had a physical art gallery. In 1981, Alice King, the daughter of shipping magnate Tung Chao-yung and sister of former Hong Kong chief executive Tung Chee-hwa, the first postcolonial government leader, joined Arts Promotion and added Chinese art into the mix.
They opened a space in Wellington Street, Central and, within a few years, moved into nearby Prince’s Building, now Landmark Prince’s. They called it Alisan Fine Arts, an amalgam of their first names.
Daphne King-yao, King’s daughter, who now runs the gallery, says the two women were front runners at a time when there wasn’t the same interest as today in modern art produced by the Chinese diaspora. They worked together happily for nearly a decade before Walters left to set up her own gallery in the Mandarin Oriental and later, an art consultancy business.
That began a new chapter of her career which saw her mostly helping hotels and other businesses buy art. She was a shrewd negotiator and had great success as a businesswoman, one who was known to sell art that met a client’s needs rather than just works that appealed to her own tastes.
French bank Société Générale’s Hong Kong office was a key early client for Arts Promotion, King-yao says. Then, in 2006, Walters became art consultant to Hongkong Land, the biggest commercial landlord in Central, taking over the role that Nigel Cameron played for many years.
During Cameron’s time, successive Hongkong Land art committees had amassed hundreds of works, but most of them were in storage by the time Walters came on board. A new chief executive of Hongkong Land, Pang Yiu-kai, was keen to connect the brand with culture and society.
The committee asked Walters to help with a detailed audit of exactly what art the company had at the time. “Sandra was shocked by what she found. She kept saying, I can’t believe you are sitting on all of this,” recalls Sherry Wong, who joined the company in 2009 and is the current chairman of its art committee.
There are around 350 pieces in the collection and multiple works by Wong, Lui Shou-Kwan, Liu Kuo-sung and Cheung Yee were all hidden away, she says. Thanks to Walters’ guidance, around 99 per cent of the collection is now on display, either in the many public lobbies around Central or in the group’s offices.She also made suggestions for new commissions, such as local artist Jaffa Lam’s Rejuvenated Bonsai (2015), a sculpture made with recycled materials on display in a public area of Jardine House.
In recent years, there was much talk of retirement, but it never really happened. The Walters intended to move to Paris in 2003 but instead continued to spend most of their time in Hong Kong as Sandra continued to take on projects in the region, working with the Four Seasons Hotel and the Shangri-La Hotel Group.
She wound down most of her business at the end of 2015 to spend more time in France, a country with which she had a lifelong affinity (she received the Chevalier de L’Ordre des Arts et Lettres in 1989 and the Chevalier de l’Order National du Merite in 2016 from the French government). But, as recently as November, she was still very much the woman about town, and accepted an honorary membership from the Rotary Club of Hong Kong in person (she was the club’s first female president from 2001-2).
Walters was back in Paris when she suffered a cerebral haemorrhage on January 18 and went into a coma. Her husband, sons and younger sister Tamara were with her when she died on January 30.
Her family asks those who want to make a donation in her honour to make a gift to the Rotary Club and the Hong Kong Arts Centre, where she had served as a director and on various committees since the early 1990s.
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