One day in February, 1972, Zao Wou-ki (趙無極) entered his studio in Paris, smeared his palette with a variety of the bronze and brown inks he'd started favoring of late and whiled away the afternoon painting an abstract landscape -- a forest clearing with a stream running through it, perhaps, maybe the brittle scrub brush found at the top of a beach. Last week in Taipei, after adorning the walls of several different rooms in several different cities and countries for 32 years, 2.9.72, as Zao titled it, sold on the auction block for NT$8.3 million. Not bad for a day's work.
Chinese art is largely thought to be scrolls of ancient calligraphy and watercolors of carp or horses. Western-style Chinese oil painting is a relatively new thing. Newer still is an investment market for this art.
During Taiwan's "economic miracle" of the 1980s, new wealth afforded greater interest in art. It wasn't until the 1990s, however, that a system was established among local collectors. This spring, even as blossoms come to branch and painters fill fresh canvases, Taiwan's collectors are filling auction halls in search of art that inspires and, with any luck, will eventually earn them a high return.
The auction at which Zao's painting was sold saw 44 lots purchased and NT$67.5 million change hands. Next Sunday, another local auctioneer, Leader, will put 62 works by Chinese and Taiwanese painters on the block in transactions certain to total millions more.
Though the numbers are significant, they represent a decline from the 1990s, the salad days of Taiwan's art market, when collectors seemed as much in love with the auctions themselves as with the art up for grabs. At the first art sale held in Taiwan in December 1990 by Heritage Arts International, spectators fidgeted as the price rose on a single work by Hung Jui-lin (洪瑞 麟) titled Mineworkers. Though bidding started at NT$800,000, a breathless bout of one-upmanship quickly took it to NT$1.8 million, more than twice its estimated value.
"We've entered a leveling-off period in Taiwan's art market," said Odile Chen (陳惠黛), art specialist at Ravenel auction house and contributor to its Art and Investment periodic investor's guide. "It peaked in the 1990s, but dropped during the recent economic recession. Now that the stock market is recovering, the art market is too. ? Culture is a long-term business."
Relating the art and stock markets is not coincidental. Savvy investors have long found opportunities in art and even banks have involved themselves in the trade.
"Works of art are assets in just the same way that securities are," explains Petra Arends, executive director of art banking at Switzerland's UBS, in Art and Investment "They have a traceable price history and of course their own market."
The local art market mimics the stock market in another way. Artists' works are priced per unit, the hao (
Even with this mathematical approach, the market for contemporary art is volatile, compared with more traditional tradable properties, given its subjective nature. Nowhere is this more true than in Taiwan and China, where non-artistic factors such as national pride hold sway over the value of art.
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