Tina Tian has spent more than half of her adult life in Sydney, but she still cannot figure out why the streets are deserted after dusk.
“I don’t know where people go,” she says. “It feels lonely, there’s nowhere to go."
Property developer and philanthropist Tina Tian.Credit: Dominic Lorrimer
Tian, a property developer and philanthropist, wonders why so many of the city’s 5 million residents seem determined to lock themselves in their homes by 7 o’clock at night. “For Australians or Western people, this is your home time,” she says. “But for Asians, I think they don’t feel like going home until 10 o’clock.”
Compared with vibrant Chinese cities such as Beijing, Shanghai or Hong Kong, Australia’s global city is, well, boring. “This is where I’ll retire maybe,” she says. “Sorry about that.”
Tian, 35, is disarmingly honest for a corporate leader and wickedly funny; a glass of Sauvignon Blanc has barely touched her lips before she confides about the heavy weight of fatherly expectation on her shoulders.
“And, of course, I’m his favourite,” she says, laughing. “I’m the youngest one, prettier.”
Retirement is a distant prospect for Tian who heads TWT Property Group, a developer with $500 million worth of projects in Sydney including residential developments in Pyrmont, Bondi Junction and Darling Harbour as well as $200 million of other assets.
Tian’s father David is a property developer in China, while her mother Yuzku also worked in the family business. They provide powerful role models for their daughter, but also big shoes to fill.
“I just don’t want to disappoint my parents, especially my father,” Tian says. “He has a lot of hope for me.”
Yet her ambitions extend beyond building apartments in Sydney as part of the city’s real estate gold rush. Tian’s charitable endeavours range from creating specialist suicide prevention services for migrants and international students to providing cheap studio space for artists.
She is also an avid collector, amassing artworks by Abdul Abdullah, Janet Laurence, Lindy Lee, Xiao Lu, Judy Millar and George Tjungurrayi that will be displayed in the lobby of the company’s Bondi Junction development.
She has commissioned Chinese artist Xia Hang to create a public artwork titled Memory Tree for Darling Harbour and Maria Fernanda Cardoso to create sculptures out of sandstone quarried from TWT’s construction site in Pyrmont.
The yellow block sandstone extracted from the site will also go towards restoring heritage buildings such as the State Library and Australian Museum.
The sandstone extracted from the site will also go towards restoring heritage buildings in Sydney.Credit: Louise Kennerley
Tian and her company may not yet be a household name like Harry Triguboff’s Meriton, but she has quickly made her presence felt in the city’s built fabric and cultural life. “I want to prove I can do it to my parents [and] to the industry as well,” she says. “And I think the whole team wants to do the same.”
Designer dressed and wearing movie star-sized sunglasses, Tian cuts a stylish swathe through the lunchtime crowd at Wild Sage in Cammeray on Sydney’s north shore. It is familiar territory for Tian whose life changed dramatically when she left China as a teenager to attend Wenona School in North Sydney where she completed the HSC.
The mother-of-two has been a striking figure in a male-dominated industry since she first donned a hard hat as a cadet at property developer Multiplex while studying a degree in construction and economics.
Her children, Tim, 6, and Tia, 4, can occasionally be found in her company’s St Leonards headquarters, while their mother is in meetings. “I do compromise with my work to spend time with them,” she says, “because in my childhood my parents were always very busy ... Maybe they don’t care but I want to spend the quality time with them.”
Tian says her first months in Australia were “a really tough time for me” as she struggled with language and loneliness. She later became a boarder at the independent high school, making a few close friends, students from Hong Kong and Taiwan.
“I helped the girls in maths and they helped with English,” she says. “Boarding school at that time was really, really good.”
She went on to study at the University of Technology, Sydney - one of only a few women in her course. “In the first year it was really challenging for me,” she says. “I couldn’t understand it at all.”
“I fled back to China and told my father ‘I don’t want to do it’."
However, Tian’s parents convinced her to return to Sydney to continue her studies, which she began to enjoy after combining it with work at property giants Multiplex and Buildcorp.
As a young woman, Tian was a novelty on construction sites, but she says she never felt uncomfortable among male colleagues. However she recalls a former manager at Multiplex telling her: “You know, Tina, as a lady to work in a construction company you have to be tough.”
She also notes a double-standard that allows men to swear or lose their temper, while women are deemed aggressive if they act in a similar manner. “I have to work much harder to get the same respect and for the business you have to be more careful and do everything right,” she says.
Tian, an Australian citizen, says she has given up arguing with people who look upon her suspiciously as a “Chinese developer”.
“You just get used to it,” she says. “And you have your own advantage because you can speak with the Asian community, you can speak to the Western community. So why complain?”
The 2017 China Philanthropic Person of the Year, Tian’s most prominent projects are arguably in the fields of mental health and the arts rather than bricks and mortar.
A founder and director of the Bridging Hope Charity Foundation, which gives about $500,000 each year, Tian bankrolled this year’s Biennale of Sydney, the city’s major contemporary arts festival.
Tian, who divides her time between Sydney, Beijing and Hong Kong, also provides studio space to artists, performers, musicians and filmmakers at the TWT Creative Precinct in St Leonards at a cost of $1 million a year.
Artist Caroline Rothwell at the TWT Creative Precinct in St Leonards.Credit: Christopher Pearce
The foundation is the principal supporter of the Big Anxiety Festival, a biennial event ran by the University of NSW that brings together artists and scientists to tackle questions about mental health.
Tian’s foundation has also given money to Lifeline, the suicide prevention charity, to provide specialist services for Chinese communities living in Australia. The program, she says, is designed to help people experiencing mental health issues: “They can speak to other people in a language they feel comfortable with. I think that’s really good to provide that to Asian people.”
Tian says her experiences as a boarder at Wenona and later at university motivated her philanthropic support for mental health. She says life can be a struggle for international students and migrants, living in an alien culture and separated from their family and friends.
“I felt lonely and couldn’t communicate with other people,” she says, “especially my parents who were busy and couldn’t speak to me on the phone all the time.”
Tian says her friends tried to alleviate her struggles by inviting her to church. “It was a nice environment, people were helpful, but I fell asleep,” she says, sheepishly.
Another challenge for Tian was the divorce of her parents while she was in high school.
“I felt shy to talk about it,” she says, “because we feel it’s not a good thing in China at that time. People hide it. So I pretended the family was still together.”
She recalls her surprise at how easily a fellow student at Wenona talked about her parent’s separation and new relationships. “It was her parents’ problem,” she says. “She didn’t feel any embarrassment or duty or anything at all.”
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