Louise Blouin and Wang Guangyi launch artinfo.com in Beijing

Unfortunately, it turned out to be a small press conference with several Chinese and foreign journalists rather than a lunch at which which Ms Louise T Blouin MacBain proposed to give Danwei Media a million bucks, but she certainly is an interesting woman.

Together with her then husband John MacBain, she bought Auto Hebdo, a classified car trading magazine in her home town of Montreal in 1987. As Chairman and CEO, Ms Blouin MacBain grew the company into Trader Classified Media, which acquired more than 400 classified ad and listings and 60 websites (before the dot com boom).

She is now out of the business and running the Louise T Blouin Foundation, publishing art magazines, and organizing events like the Creative Leadership Summit which brings people as diverse as Henry Kissinger and Wikipedia founder Jimmy Wales together to discuss how culture and creativity can improve the world.

She was recently in Beiing to promote one of her new projects, Artinfo.com, a portal about the visual arts that allows artists to upload their works and set up profiles in the manner of social networking websites like Facebook. The site has a Chinese language version, but that only loads if your computer operating system is Chinese. The site does no enable e-commerce, but during the press conference Ms Blouin said she hoped that artists who are not in big Chinese cities would be able to use the website to make connections across the country and abroad, and eventually find people to buy their works. Artist Wang Guangyi—founder of the McDonald's and Coke plus Cult Rev icons school of painting—joined Ms Blouin for the press conference, and she seems to have enlisted a small network of supporters in China to kick start the Chinese section of the site.

In person, Ms Blouin comes off a little like an ethereal hippy, although judging from her track record of making things happen and making money, I suspect the slow left coast lyricism in her voice belies a mind like a steel trap. But will the Chinese version of her website become as popular than Charles Saatchi's online gallery which has an extensive Chinese section? Or are both websites really just online vanity publications, playthings for the rich?