David Kay rents the remains of an abandoned electronics factory and has turned it into a loft in the 798 Art Zone. Darnell Gardner Jr / for China Daily

A legal veteran takes his fate in his own hands and turns to the world of arts

After 20 years as an intellectual property lawyer, David Kay decided to take his life in a more creative direction. Kay is the chairman and founder of Yuanfen Flow, an art gallery and what he calls an "incubator", a place for artists to formulate sustainable creative business ventures.

This new project was built upon the skills, knowledge and contacts he acquired as a student of Chinese, an intellectual property lawyer and a technology enthusiast.

Kay, from Colorado, attributes his love of China to serendipity. While browsing the stacks in a local library for information on ceramics years ago, two books on a top shelf caught his eye.

"I brought them down just because they were pretty," he says.

"One would expect that two books with the same title would have the same language inside, but they were both in English, and the words were totally different."

The books were two translations of the I Ching, or Book of Changes, a classic work of Chinese literature. Kay, who had just failed a French exam, says he was drawn to the flexibility one can exercise when interpreting Chinese.

"If you can translate it this way or that way and they're both OK, then that's my kind of language."

He immediately enrolled in Chinese classes at nearby Denver University. His interest in Chinese carried him east to Brown University in Providence, Rhode Island, where he graduated with a degree in Chinese, and further east still to Taiwan for additional studies.

Upon returning to the US, Kay ached for change. "I wanted to learn a new language, and that was business," he says.

He went on to learn this new language at the Arizona-based Thunderbird School of Global Management, where he gained an MBA and helped found the school's first exchange with the Chinese mainland.

His experience with China netted him numerous job offers from a variety of US government agencies, but Kay saw more opportunities in the legal field.

He enrolled at UCLA, where he studied Chinese intellectual property law and gained a legal degree. With that in hand, Kay went to Hong Kong to work for international law firm Baker & McKenzie.

Several career shifts later, Kay found himself working as a lawyer in Beijing.

"Naturally, I started collecting an interesting selection of clients," he says. "They were all sort of high-tech clients, and one of them was Microsoft."

It was the early 1990s, and Microsoft was looking for someone to help get its foot into the Chinese market. It relied on Kay's expertise to make the transition.

"I know more about Microsoft than most of the people at Microsoft," he says. "I'd been with them since their beginning days."

Microsoft China would make him its general counsel in 2003. Halfway through his tenure as general counsel, he became Microsoft China's "piracy czar".

"We had a 95 percent usage rate of our operating system, which was great, but unfortunately no one was buying it," Kay says.

Kay worked to change the perception of owning authentic Microsoft products, particularly the Windows operating system. He says the key for Microsoft was to focus not on the software itself, but on how customers thought of it.

"You sell security, you don't sell software," he says. "You sell a safe experience."

Kay says after the disappointing release of Windows Vista, he began to feel it might be time to move on to something else.

He discovered Beijing's 798 district in 2003, when it was just beginning to emerge as an enclave for artists. He rented out the remains of an abandoned electronics factory and began transforming it into a loft.

"I could put in all these cool design ideas because I had the space," he says. "I could raise a baby elephant in here."

Five years later, Kay saw that 798 had grown into a thriving haven for the arts and decided it was finally time to leave Microsoft. He wanted to participate in the metamorphosis of 798.

Having little experience in the art world, he looked to his past to help create a new future.

"The thing that made the most sense was for me to do something where technology and art meet," he says. He opened up a new-media art gallery in his loft, but he still felt something was missing. He says that of the dozens of artists he worked with, he noticed none was able to live off of their creativity. He wanted to change that.

"A lot of what was missing was sustainability for the artists," he says.

Kay remembered a rejected business proposal he had devised while at Microsoft for what he called a "creativity incubator". The project would bring together artists, academics and business professionals to develop sustainable creative ventures.

He decided to revisit this idea, naming it Yuanfen Flow (Yuanfen refers to the fate that brings people together) and basing it in his loft.

"This place creates a platform that really encourages people in their creative process," he says.

He says Yuanfen Flow blends practicality and creativity. His staff includes lawyers, philosophers and architects in addition to artists specializing in a variety of mediums.

"It's not just that these people bring a particular skill set that you might need, but they're also bringing a whole different way of thinking," he says.

"My favorite are the artists. An artist knows from the very beginning that a great idea is useless if they can't sell it."

He says artists and entrepreneurs work together in Yuanfen Flow to create sustainable enterprises.

"I've been in the corporate law world, the high-tech side of things, and I've been an art gallery director. Those are all very different skill sets, but it also allowed me to build an interesting network of friends and resources that can generally help."

He speaks wistfully of the loft, which boasts a swimming pool, gym and exceptional views of Beijing from its rooftop.

"I believe this space has been good to me because I've been very respectful of it. All the things that I've done here, I've tried to do in keeping with the space."

Kay says he knew the old factory was special when he spotted a potter's wheel that had been left behind by the previous owner.

"I started studying Chinese because of ceramics," he says. "Thirty years later, I'm in the middle of Beijing in a German-built electronics factory, and I find a potter's wheel inside. Something in the universe must have brought me to this particular factory."

For China Daily

(China Daily 06/22/2012 page21)