The contemporary art market is booming with Chinese artists helping to push prices up by nearly a fifth in the past year, the world’s biggest art index said yesterday.
Rocketing prices for living artists have for the first time become the motor of the market, Artprice said.
Nowhere is the trend more marked than in the Chinese-speaking world, with works sold in Taiwan, Hong Kong and China accounting for more than a quarter of the global total.
Photo: AFP
The record price for an Asian artist was smashed on Sunday when Zao Wou-ki’s (趙無極) huge abstract triptych Juin-Octobre 1985 went under the hammer for US$65 million in Hong Kong.
The sum is nearly three times the previous record, also held for a work by Zao, set only nine months ago for another of his masterpieces, 29.01.64.
Painters like Zhang Xiaogang (張曉剛), Zeng Fanzhi (曾梵志) and Chen Yifei (陳逸飛) — one of whose hyperrealistic depictions of melancholic women in traditional dress sold for US$22.7 million in December — are leading a new wave of Chinese art superstars.
“In China 1 million contemporary artists are living from their work,” Artprice founder Thierry Ehrmann said.
“They are coming to dominate the market because of their number, the quality of their work and their sharp critical sense,” he added, with sales from Taiwan and China nearing half a billion US dollars.
Ehrmann had earlier predicted that the art market was entering a “new era of prosperity” thanks to the thirst for modern and contemporary work.
The US$110.5 million paid for a painting by the black American artist Jean-Michel Basquiat in May was no flash in the pan, he said.
Basquiat, who began as a graffiti artist and died at 27 from a heroin overdose, is now the sixth-most expensive artist ever.
A street was named after him in Paris this weekend ahead of a major retrospective of his work at the Vuitton Foundation.
Basquiat heads the list of the year’s top-selling contemporary artists, with US$256 million of sales ahead of the Scot Peter Doig (US$101 million) and Italian painter and installation artist Rudolf Stingel (US$52 million).
Ehrmann said “contemporary art, with postwar art, is the only really performing period” right now although they account between them for only a third of all sales.
“Artists are having works coming up for auction at the age of 25 or 30. That would have been impossible before,” he added.
However, the burgeoning contemporary market is dominated by about 500 artists who between them account for 89 percent of global sales, the index revealed in its annual report.
Artprice also found that the average price of contemporary drawings, paintings, sculptures, videos and installations has more than quadrupled from the turn of the millennium to US$28,000.
Demand for contemporary work was the weakest part of the art market, but its share has risen fivefold since 2000, it added.
Ehrmann said that its success is partly because artists have “come back down to earth, and are engaged with their times... Like in during the 1960s, artists are taking positions on society.”
He said that artists and their galleries have also become streetwise, “limiting their production” and what comes to market so as not to undermine their prices.
With museums becoming “the cathedrals of the 21st century where people try to find the sacred in a society which has lost it,” art’s attraction is undimmed, he said.
Three auction houses dominate the contemporary market, the report found — Sotheby’s (28 percent), Christie’s (26 percent) and Phillips (15 percent).
However, six of the 10 biggest players in the world are now Chinese.
Modern art made up for nearly half of auction sales over the past 12 months, Artprice said, followed by postwar art (21 percent), contemporary (12 percent), with Old Masters and 19th-century art accounting for about 10 percent each.
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