“Through this consolidation, there will be better discernment of good artists and good works and their inherent value” said Li of the Poly Group. “The true connoisseurs of Chinese contemporary art, the collectors are left ... and they will be able to pay reasonable money for reasonable things.”
Misung Shim, the head of Seoul Auction, which sold a large work of British artist Damien Hirst in Hong Kong this month for US$2.2 million, an auction record for the artist in Asia, sees growing opportunities beyond China’s art scene.
“We are trying to open the Western art market in Hong Kong rather than the Chinese paintings market,” she said.
Over the past three decades, Chinese contemporary art has writhed out of the wilderness
of Chairman Mao Zedong’s (毛澤東) Cultural Revolution purges and upheavals like the Tiananmen Square massacre in 1989, later piggy-backing on China’s economic and political rise, to catch the eye of the global art community.
While plunging prices of avant-garde art worldwide represents a big potential upside, major art investors such as Philip Hoffman of the Fine Art Fund in London are putting their money more in conservative, safer bets, with recent Asian sales in New York and Hong Kong showing strong demand and prices for traditional categories of Chinese art, including classic ink brush paintings, imperial scholars’ objects, and Ming and Qing dynasty ceramics.
“We’ve allocated more to porcelain and ancient art, but we’ve allocated very little to Chinese contemporary,” Hoffman said.
“I’ve been amazed to see how the recession has not been affecting the very best [traditional] Chinese art.”
At its peak, the Chinese contemporary art market was seen by some to be highly manipulated and speculative.
Auction houses were accused of collusion with artists to inflate prices, critics and curators blamed for hyping up artists reputations for hard cash, and artists churned out works straight for auction, production-style with an army of assistants, rather than going through the traditional primary market of art galleries first.
“In a Chinese context, the phenomenon of auctions in the art market is a very new thing,” said Ingrid Dudek, a contemporary Chinese art specialist with Christie’s.
“A lot of the results were driven by private collectors, indicating not necessarily speculation, but of enormous demand ... maybe that did make the correction hurt a little bit more too because you didn’t have a dealer network that was there.”
Now though, galleries and dealers seem to be making a comeback, with artists seeing the worth of being patiently backed and promoted to ensure reputations and valuations are less vulnerable to market volatilities.
“Some other galleries think going to auction is a test of the market value [of an artist] so they can make faster money. But we try to do the opposite,” said Federico Keller of Hong Kong’s Connoisseur Contemporary gallery, which specializes in Asian and younger Chinese artists.
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