The high-energy, low-profile collector Basma Al Sulaiman resists easy classification. Divorced and living in London since 2000, she has built a collection that is remarkable for the breadth of its holdings in Chinese, Indian, and South Asian contemporary art. She has also become a patron of art in and from her native Saudi Arabia. And although Al Sulaiman might have joined the museum building boom in the Middle East or created a  private institution in London, she has opted for a more egalitarian platform. The Basma Al Sulaiman Museum of Contemporary Art — or BASMOCA — is the first virtual museum to present an actual private collection to a limitless global audience of wired visitors. Launched in April 2011 with a ceremony in the port city of Jeddah, where Al Sulaiman was raised and keeps a second home, BASMOCA allows visitors to assume avatars and interface with friends or fellow visitors as they make their way through a sleek virtual museum that, at least in cyberspace, occupies a palm tree fringed island oasis surrounded by a tranquil blue sea.

It is my first visit to Al Sulaiman’s art- and antique-filled townhouse in London’s Belgravia district, and a bow-tied servant graciously serves coffee as I wait in the formal drawing room. The collector’s laughter drifts in. Biding my time, I scan the generously proportioned Georgian salon, with its elaborately plastered ceiling and French windows overlooking a small park. I spot a Thomas Gainsborough, set like a trophy between the windows, but on close inspection it proves to be Banksy’s "Fetish Lady" of 2006, a modified found canvas sheathed in a gold frame and depicting an elegantly frocked, demurely posed woman sporting a black leather S&M mask. A studded dog collar rests against her pearl necklace and is connected by a chain to a wrist strap. The Banksy maintains a provocative counterpoint to the antique furnishings, Venetian glass chandelier, grand piano, Persian rugs, and other accoutrements of the high-style interior.

Other contemporary works in the room are equally challenging, if less transgressive. A stainless steel scholar’s rock by Zhan Wang perches on a table. Above the fireplace hangs Zhang Xiaogang’s severe "Comrade" painting from 1995, one of two owned by Al Sulaiman from his storied "Bloodline" series. Yang Shaobin’s "No. 4," 2001-02, an abstracted figurative composition in crimson tones, commands more wall space. Al Sulaiman acquired the painting at Christie’s Hong Kong in 2007 for HK$1,807,500 ($233,393). Impressive in its own corner is an aluminum and bronze sculpture of stacked suitcases, Subodh Gupta’s "Kuwait to Delhi," 2006, which was inspired by the Indian laborers who travel back and forth between their homeland and their work in the Middle East. One of Shao Fan’s much-admired deconstructed chairs, this one a Ming example reassembled with Plexiglas, is just visible in a corridor. Although a small Gerhard Richter abstract typically sits on an easel in the drawing room (today it’s absent) and a Georg Baselitz painting hangs on one wall, the majority of works by Western artists are installed elsewhere in the house. In the dining room, for example, the two parts of Tracey Emin’s large neon "Our Angels (Foundlings and Fledglings)" — a bird on a leafy branch and a cursive text — cast a soft blue glow from opposite walls. The piece was  shown in the British pavilion during the 2007 Venice Biennale.