There was a 100-foot-tall nude woman, her white shoulders like clouds, rolling around on the hill to our right. Below, on the mudflats coming up to the harbor's banks, huge eyes and mouths popped out of the wet ground, growling and chirping. To the left, on the trees, a gigantic skull twisted and changed, now human, now simian, now some terrible distortion of a head, a tour of death and birth and evolution all at once.

The American artist Tony Oursler, who was responsible for all this—video projected onto the landscape—was watching over his creation one evening last November from the deck of the Kaukapakapa country house of Alan Gibbs—at 68, one of the wealthiest men in New Zealand and one of its leading art patrons. The house itself, overlooking Kaipara Harbour, an hour or so north of Auckland, is a modest enough affair for someone reported to be worth over $450 million, even if little else here is particularly unassuming. A sample fun weekend activity at the Farm: sit inside the caged ball at the top of the world's largest Tesla coil while several million volts of electricity spin around you before they burst into 40-foot-long lightning bolts. "It'll knock your socks off," Gibbs told me a month later, his voice resonating like a pistol shot over the phone. "We've all been inside the damn thing: It's scary as hell."

As night fell it started raining a bit and it was getting colder, despite the fact that this was the end of November, the beginning of summer in New Zealand, and Oursler—a mellow, six-foot-tall, 50-year-old New Yorker who gives the impression that he is both larger and younger than he actually is—was worrying that someone would get electrocuted by all the cables he had running around. His unruly gray hair and bright, boyish eyes complement a grin that looks as if it must be just the same now as it was when he was eight. "Can we move the one on the knoll down a little?" he called down to an assistant on a scaffold beneath the deck that supported three enormous projectors beaming images onto the landscape. "If we move it down, do you think we'll need to cut that tree back?" The woman was replaced by a pair of great white hands, kneading the hill beneath them. "The hands look good," he said. "I think that's perfect."

These projections—made up of a series of wondrous images of twisting, crawling, sitting, and floating women, as well as an arm and hammer, an arm and knife, writhing snakes, pyrotechnics, and bullet holes in the sky—form the latest art object for Gibbs's sculpture park. Gibbs has been installing art pieces on the Farm, a sort of private Storm King—the upstate New York institution that expanded the concept of a sculpture garden into a sculpture landscape—since 1992, on some 1,000 acres of grassy land, more than twice the size of its American counterpart. The acreage is home to sheep, goats, cows, pheasants, llamas, yaks, and two giraffes, in addition to the extraordinary sculpture collection—most of it abstract Minimalist work—Gibbs has commissioned, made up of roughly half international and half New Zealand art. Sculpture is Gibbs's main interest, though he does have a Warhol painting of a gigantic black-and-yellow dollar sign inside the house. Pieces include Sol LeWitt's Pyramid (Keystone, NZ), made of narrow concrete steps rising 25 feet into the sky; an Andy Goldsworthy series of terra-cotta arches creeping out into the tide; a nearly half-mile-long hand-painted functional livestock fence made by Daniel Buren; and a kind of covered gateway by the Maori artist Ralph Hotere, which leads to the historical grave site of Maori chief Te Hemera Tauhia on the hill above. Ground will break soon on an Anish Kapoor piece that will reportedly tunnel through a hill, and in November the English sculptor Antony Gormley, known for placing haunting, blank-faced figures in the landscape, paid an exploratory visit to the site. Gibbs already has one of the largest works Richard Serra has ever done, the Te Tuhirangi Contour, a 20-foot-high, 843-foot-long ribbon of rust-red Cor-Ten steel. "The first thing Alan said to me was, 'I've just been to Storm King,'" Serra has explained. "I have a very large piece at Storm King, and I think it's a fairly consequential piece. Alan said, 'I want a more significant piece than that. I don't want any wimpy piece in the landscape, I don't want any small bullshit like that.'" Gibbs told me, "I've had more arguments with Richard Serra than probably anybody has."