Judith Neilson is showing me her tattoo. We're sitting in a large, open room at Dangrove, the eye-catching and fortress-like warehouse in Sydney’s Alexandria, where Neilson stores her vast art collection.

Soft light bounces off the concrete-and-steel interior as music floats in from behind the closed doors of the building’s Great Hall. A group of musicians is recording, making use of the room’s unique acoustics and Neilson’s new Fazioli, hand-built in Italy, which she insists is “the best piano in Australia”. In the store rooms around and below us, more than a dozen staff are working on packaging, storing and cataloguing about 2500 artworks, collected mostly from China.