The Chinese Art Explosion
As works by Chinese artists fetch multimillion-dollar prices, the
international art world is waking to the power of the Asian market.
China has spawned hundreds of new galleries, 1,600 auction houses,
art fairs, and growing numbers of contemporary-art collectors, while
accusations surface that some are engaging in widespread speculation
by Barbara Pollack
The market for Chinese contemporary art has developed at a feverish
pace, becoming the single fastest-growing segment of the
international art market. Since 2004, prices for works by Chinese
contemporary artists have increased by 2,000 percent or more, with
paintings that once sold for under $50,000 now bringing sums above $1
million. Nowhere has this boom been felt more appreciably than in
China, where it has spawned massive gallery districts, 1,600 auction
houses, and the first generation of Chinese contemporary-art collectors.
This craze for Chinese contemporary art has also given rise to a wave
of criticism. There are charges that Chinese collectors are using
mainland auction houses to boost prices and engage in widespread
speculation, just as if they were trading in stocks or real estate.
Western collectors are also being accused of speculation, by artists
who say they buy works cheap and then sell them for ten times the
original prices—and sometimes more.
Those who entered this market in the past three years found Chinese
contemporary art to be a surefire bet as prices doubled with each
sale. Sotheby's first New York sale of Asian contemporary art,
dominated by Chinese artists, brought a total of $13 million in March
2006; the same sale this past March garnered $23 million, and
Sotheby's Hong Kong sale of Chinese contemporary art in April totaled
nearly $34 million. Christie's Hong Kong has had sales of Asian
contemporary art since 2004. Its 2005 sales total of $11 million was
dwarfed by the $40.7 million total from a single evening sale in May
of this year.
These figures, impressive as they are, do not begin to convey the
astounding success at auction of a handful of Chinese artists: Zhang
Xiaogang, Yue Minjun, Cai Guo-Qiang, Liu Xiaodong, and Liu Ye. The
leader this year was Zeng Fanzhi, whose Mask Series No. 6 (1996) sold
for $9.6 million, a record for Chinese contemporary art, at
Christie's Hong Kong in May.
Zhang Xiaogang, who paints large, morose faces reminiscent of family
photographs taken during the Cultural Revolution, has seen his record
rise from $76,000 in 2003, when his oil paintings first appeared at
Christie's Hong Kong, to $2.3 million in November 2006, to $6.1
million in April of this year.
Gunpowder drawings by Cai Guo-Qiang, who was recently given a
retrospective at the Guggenheim Museum in New York, sold for well
below $500,000 in 2006; a suite of 14 works brought $9.5 million last
November.
According to the Art Price Index, Chinese artists took 35 of the top
100 prices for living contemporary artists at auction last year,
rivaling Jeff Koons, Damien Hirst, and a host of Western artists.
"Everybody is looking to the East and to China, and the art market
isn't any different," says Kevin Ching, CEO of Sotheby's Asia.
"Notwithstanding the subprime crisis in the U.S. or the fact that
some of the other financial markets seem jittery, the overall
business community still has great faith in China, bolstered by the
Olympics and the World Expo in Shanghai in 2010."
There are indications, however, that the international market for
Chinese art is beginning to slow. At Sotheby's Asian contemporary-art
sale in March, 20 percent of the lots offered found no buyers, and
even works by top record-setters such as Zhang Xiaogang barely made
their low estimates. "The market is getting mature, so we can't sell
everything anymore," says Xiaoming Zhang, Chinese contemporary-art
specialist at Sotheby's New York. "The collectors have become really
smart and only concentrate on certain artists, certain periods,
certain material."
For their part, Western galleries are eagerly pursuing Chinese
artists, many of whom were unknown just a few years ago. Zeng Fanzhi,
for example, has been signed by Acquavella Galleries in New York, in
a two-year deal that exceeds $20 million, according to a Beijing
gallerist close to the negotiations; William Acquavella declined to
comment. Zhang Xiaogang and Zhang Huan have joined PaceWildenstein,
and Ai Weiwei and Liu Xiaodong showed with Mary Boone last spring.
Almost every major New York gallery has recently signed on a Chinese
artist: Yan Pei Ming at David Zwirner, Xu Zhen at James Cohan, Huang
Yong Ping at Gladstone, Yang Fudong at Marian Goodman, Liu Ye at
Sperone Westwater. Their works are entering private and public
collections that until now have not shown any particular interest in
Asian contemporary art.
"The market hasn't behaved as I anticipated," says New York dealer
Max Protetch, who has been representing artists from China since
1996. "We all anticipated that the Chinese artists would go through
the same critical process that happens with art anywhere else in the
world. I assumed that some artists would fall by the wayside, which
has not been true. They all have become elevated. It seems like an
uncritical market."
One of the key artists buoyed by this success is Zeng Fanzhi, who is
best known for his "Mask" series. Five years ago his works sold for
under $50,000. Today he commands prices on the primary market closer
to $1 million, with major collectors Charles Saatchi and Jose Mugrabi
among his fans. Now preparing for his first solo show at Acquavella
in December, he is considered one of the more serious artists on the
Beijing scene because he works alone, without the horde of assistants
found in most other artists' studios in China. Still, his lifestyle
is typical of that of his equally successful peers. When asked if he
owns a mammoth black Hummer parked outside his studio, he answers,
"No, that's an ugly car. I have a G5 Benz."
This success has blossomed under the watchful eye of the Chinese
government. Movies, television, and news organizations are strictly
censored, but on the whole, the visual arts are not. Despite sporadic
incidents of exhibitions being closed or customs officials seizing
artworks, by and large the government has supported the growth of an
art market and has not interfered with private activity. In the 798
gallery district in Beijing, a Bauhaus-style former munitions complex
that has been transformed into the capital's hottest art center, with
more than 150 galleries, one finds works addressing poverty and other
social problems, official corruption, and new sexual mores. The icons
of the former China—happy workers and peasants and heroic soldiers
raising the red banner—are treated with irony, if at all, by the
artists whose works are on view in these galleries, which are private
venues generally not under the strict control of the Ministry of
Culture.
On the eve of the Olympics, however, the government asked one gallery
to postpone an exhibition until after the games. Considered
unsuitable was "Touch," a show by Ma Baozhong at the Xin Beijing
Gallery of 15 paintings depicting important moments in Chinese
history, including one based on a photograph showing Mao Zedong with
the Dalai Lama and the Panchen Lama in 1954.
The Beijing municipality spent enormous funds to renovate the 798
district before the Olympics, putting in new cobblestone streets and
lining its main thoroughfare with cafés. Shanghai, which has
benefited less from government support, now boasts at least 100
galleries. Local governments throughout the country are establishing
SoHo-style gallery districts to boost tourism.
One person who seems confident about the future of the Chinese market
is Arne Glimcher, founder and president of PaceWildenstein, who
opened a branch of his gallery in Beijing in August. Located in a
22,000-square-foot cement space with soaring ceilings, redesigned at
a cost of $20 million by architect Richard Gluckman, the gallery is
in the center of the 798 district. "We are committed to the art, and
we wanted to open a gallery where our artists are," says Glimcher.
Adding that he normally eschews the "McGallery" trend of setting up
satellite spaces around the world, Glimcher insists that it was
necessary to establish a branch in Beijing because there is "no local
gallery of our caliber" with which Pace could partner. He has,
however, recruited Leng Lin, founder of Beijing Commune, another
gallery operating in 798, to be his director.
Another Western dealer who has taken the China plunge is Arthur
Solway, who recently opened a branch of James Cohan in Shanghai. "I
started coming to China five years ago, and I was fascinated by the
energy," says Solway, who wanted to introduce gallery artists like
Bill Viola, Wim Wenders, and Roxy Paine to Asia but, like Glimcher,
could not find a public museum or private gallery that he considered
professionally qualified to handle such exhibitions. James Cohan
Gallery Shanghai is located on the ground floor of a 1936 Art Deco
structure in the French Concession, a particularly picturesque
section of the city. The building was once occupied by the military,
and red Chinese characters over the front door still exhort, "Let the
spirit of Mao Zedong flourish for 10,000 years."
"From 1966 to 1976, during the Cultural Revolution, people had
nothing, but now there are spas in Shanghai and people drinking
cappuccinos and buying Rolex watches—it's an amazing phenomenon,"
says Solway, who believes it is only a matter of time before these
same newly affluent consumers begin to collect contemporary art.
Chinese collectors—or the hope that there will be Chinese collectors—
are the key draw luring these galleries to Beijing. As recently as
two years ago, few could name even a single Chinese collector of
contemporary art. It was a truism that the Chinese preferred to spend
their money acquiring antiquities and classical works. Since then
several well-known mainland collectors have emerged on the scene.
Most visible is Guan Yi, the suave, well-dressed heir to a chemical-
engineering fortune, who has assembled a museum-quality collection of
more than 500 works. A major lender to the Huang Yong Ping
retrospective organized by the Walker Art Center in Minneapolis in
2005, he regularly entertains museum trustees from all over the
world, who make the pilgrimage to his warehouse on the outskirts of
Beijing. Now he is building his own museum.
Another noted figure is Zhang Lan, head of the South Beauty chain of
Szechuan-style restaurants throughout China; she also has assembled
an enviable collection and displays pieces from it in her chic
establishments. The film actress Zhang Ziyi is representative of a
new class of collectors from the entertainment industry, while Pan
Shiyi and Zhang Xin, chairman and CEO of the mammoth SOHO China real
estate empire, have commissioned projects for their upscale
residential properties.
Two collectors who are cheerleaders for the Beijing art scene are
Yang Bin, an automobile-franchise mogul, and Zhang Rui, a
telecommunications executive who is also the backer of Beijing Art
Now Gallery, which took part in Art Basel in June, one of the first
Beijing galleries to appear at the fair. These two do more than
collect art. They have hosted dinners for potential collectors,
organized tours to Art Basel Miami Beach, and brought friends with
them to sales in London and New York. Zhang Rui, who owns more than
500 works, has lent art to international exhibitions, most notably
the installation Tomorrow, which features four "dead Beatles"
mannequins floating facedown, created by artists Sun Yuan and Peng Yu
for the 2006 Liverpool Biennial, which rejected it.
Zhang is now building an art hotel, featuring specially commissioned
works and artist-designed rooms, outside the Workers' Stadium in the
center of Beijing. "I am trying to think of ways of changing my
private collection into a public collection," Zhang explained to
ARTnews through a translator. It isn't financially advantageous to do
this in China, as no tax benefits accrue from donations to museums or
other nonprofit institutions.
Zhang Rui represents the handful of Chinese collectors who are public
about their activities and are building noteworthy collections. Far
more typical of buying activity in China is the rampant speculation
taking place in the mainland auction houses. There are 1,600
registered auctioneers, and their sales attract hundreds of bidders.
Chinese buyers are more comfortable with auction houses, which have
been in business since 1994, than with galleries, which weren't
licensed to operate by the government until the late 1990s.
These auction houses run by their own rules, generating what
sometimes seems like a "wild, wild East" atmosphere. It is, for
example, fairly common for a house to get consignments directly from
artists, who then use the sales to establish prices for their works
on the primary market. More often, now that China has hundreds of
galleries, dealers come to a sale with buyers in tow, publicly
bidding up works to establish "record prices" and advertise their
artists. This kind of bidding ring would be considered illegal in the
United States, but in China it is viewed as a savvy business
practice. There is little regulation of auction houses and few
developed legal norms in the field, so that even when buyers have
grievances—with fakes and forgeries, for example—they do not feel
they can resort to the law. Bidding is a social as well as a business
activity, and buyers are happy to flaunt their status by paying
record prices or quickly flipping artworks, not only for profit but
so they can boast of their short-term gains.
As the domestic market for contemporary art matures, however, many of
these practices are coming into question. "Two years ago it was more
necessary for me to bring my artists to auction," says Fang Fang,
owner of Star Gallery in Beijing, which specializes in young emerging
artists such as Chen Ke and Gao Yu. "Now that the gallery market has
increased, I find it is better to keep my artists out of the auction
rooms, and there is much less reason to sell there."
Two mainland firms, Beijing Poly International Auction Company, and
China Guardian Auctions Company, dominate the field of contemporary
Chinese art. Their combined 2007 total of more than $200 million in
sales represented nearly two-thirds of all auction sales in this
category in mainland China for the year. Last spring Guardian
achieved $142 million in sales of classical artworks, furniture,
ceramics, silver, and coins, and $40 million in sales of contemporary
material. The latter figure included the $8.2 million fetched by Liu
Xiaodong's Hotbed No. 1, a record for a painting sold on the
mainland. In a similar range of sales last spring, Poly sold $130
million worth of works, including $27 million in a single evening
contemporary-art sale. (These figures represent a slight decline for
the year because both houses held benefit sales for Szechuan
earthquake victims, raising more than $20 million to support relief
efforts.)
Poly and Guardian reflect two vastly different perspectives on the
domestic market in Chinese contemporary art. Guardian is the oldest
and most respected auction house in China, founded in 1993 by Wang
Yannan, daughter of Zhao Ziyang, the former Communist Party leader
who was placed under house arrest after opposing the government's use
of force against demonstrators at Tiananmen Square in 1989. If Poly
is known for its vast resources and willingness to make deals to nab
consignments, Guardian is known for its respected specialists and
long-term client relationships. For example, when the Museum of Fine
Arts, Boston, decided to sell 20 pieces of Qing dynasty porcelain in
mainland China, it consigned the collection to Guardian.
The atmosphere of a sale at Poly or Guardian is surprisingly similar
to that in the salerooms of Christie's or Sotheby's. The catalogues
are identical in design, and the bidding proceeds in an orderly, even
sedate, fashion, despite the crowds of spectators in the room.
"From our beginning, we studied what the principles of an auction
house should be, and we stick to these principles," says Guardian
president Wang. She also serves on the board of the new nationwide
auctioneers' association, which hopes to enforce regulations on the
auction market.
Poly is an enterprise within the China Poly Group Corporation, a $30
billion conglomerate that is the privatized branch of the People's
Liberation Army. Established initially to repatriate artworks and
antiquities, Poly has spent $100 million buying objects such as the
bronze animal heads from a water-clock fountain that were looted from
Beijing's Summer Palace by British and French troops in 1860; the
pieces later turned up in the West. The repatriated objects are
showcased in the Poly Art Museum in the sparkling New Beijing Poly
Plaza, a glass-enclosed tower designed by Skidmore, Owings & Merrill.
The more freewheeling Poly is known for practices such as putting up
for auction works from its own collection or having consignors
guarantee that they will bring buyers to the sale to meet low
estimates. Still, even here there are signs that the market is
maturing and has become too expensive for casual speculators. "These
collectors that you are talking about are actually quite small
collectors," explains Zhao Xu, senior consultant at Poly. "They
bought for several years at very affordable prices, but now that
prices are skyrocketing, the only way they can afford to buy is to
sell. The collectors that I know already come from a high social
status, and they can afford to buy pieces worth $1 million or $2
million and are looking for the best works, the masterpieces, to add
to their collections."
When asked if Poly follows the rules of the Western auction houses,
Zhao sharply retorts, "Sometimes even Sotheby's doesn't follow the
rules." Or as Gong Jisui, an art-market specialist who is a professor
at the Central Academy of Fine Arts in Beijing, says, "The Chinese
learned this game of speculation from the Westerners who played it
first."
The incident to which both men are referring is the sale of the
Estella Collection at Sotheby's Hong Kong on April 9 of this year.
The event reaped $18 million for 108 works. (An additional 80 works
will be up for sale this month at Sotheby's New York.) The collection
was put together from 2003 to 2006 by New York dealer Michael
Goedhuis for a group of investors that included Sacha Lainovic, a
director of Weight Watchers International, and Raymond Debbane, CEO
of the Invus Group, a private equity firm.
Last year the collection of approximately 200 works was sold to
William Acquavella, who consigned it to Sotheby's. Auction house
officials will not discuss financial details, but Sotheby's had a
stake in the collection. After the sale it was widely reported that
many of the artists were angered by the auction because, they said,
they had sold their works to Goedhuis at discount prices in exchange
for promises that the collection would remain together for public
display.
"The idea was to keep the collection intact and to see it safely into
some institution," says Goedhuis, who denies that any promises were
made. "The ideal situation was to see it with an institution in
China, because there is no such collection." The collection was
published in a book, China Onward, with an essay by leading China
expert Britta Erickson, and it was exhibited at the Louisiana Museum
of Modern Art in Denmark and the Israel Museum in Jerusalem shortly
before the sale. According to Goedhuis, because of the rapid rise in
prices, the investors chose to sell the collection with hopes that it
would not be broken up.
"Since the museums in China aren't mature enough nor are they rich
enough to do an acquisition like this, my hope was that Steve Wynn
would do so for his sophisticated casino complex in Macao," Goedhuis
says. He turned to Acquavella because, he says, he believed the
dealer would bring the collection to Wynn; Acquavella paid a reported
$25 million. Acquavella director Michael Findlay laughs at the
suggestion that there was any indication that the collection would go
to Wynn. "I think this whole thing is surrounded by so much rumor and
speculation," he says. "We bought a group of paintings, and we sold a
group of paintings, and that's the whole story."
According to Maarten ten Holder, Sotheby's managing director for
North and South America, the firm received inquiries before the sale
from several artists in the collection, wondering why the works were
to be auctioned. There is disagreement about whether Goedhuis made
firm promises to keep the collection together or merely made a sales
pitch to artists that inclusion in the collection would enhance their
reputations. Yue Minjun, who had two works in the sale, says no
promises were made. And Goedhuis bought Zeng Fanzhi's Chairman Mao
with Us from Hanart T Z Gallery in 2005 for the asking price,
$30,000, no discount given. It sold for $1.18 million.
"You have to understand that there was no market for this work when I
was buying," says Howard Farber, whose collection brought $20 million
at Phillips de Pury & Company in London last October. Farber
assembled 100 choice works by assiduously visiting artists' studios
in Beijing in the late 1980s, accompanied by the Beijing-based critic
Karen Smith, a leading author and curator in this field. A work for
which he paid $25,000 in 1996, Wang Guangyi's Great Criticism: Coca-
Cola, was sold at Phillips de Pury for $1.6 million. The buyer was
Farber's son-in-law, Larry Warsh, who bid on several works at the
sale, according to newspaper accounts. "I really didn't actually know
I was going to buy the Wang Guangyi until that moment," says Warsh.
"Howard has his collection, and it's not my collection, and there
were many pieces I wanted from that collection that I would have
wanted to buy but couldn't afford."
Many Beijing artists had agreements with Warsh to produce work for
his collection and his art advisory business, which began in 2004,
inspired by Farber's example in the field. "I was enamored by China,
and then I was enamored by the art of China as I learned about
important artists," says Warsh. "But what really hit me first was how
the pricing did not make sense to me at all—everything was out of
whack."
Warsh, who amassed a collection of works by Jean-Michel Basquiat,
Keith Haring, and Kenny Scharf in the late 1980s, was the publisher
of the now-defunct Museums Magazine, which he sold to LTB Media in
2004. He stated at one point that his collection totaled more than
1,200 works; now, he says, he owns approximately 400 paintings and
photographs. Part of his collection is managed by his new business
venture, AW Asia, which has a gallery in Chelsea and intends to
assemble collections of Chinese contemporary art for museums and
major private collectors. The Museum of Modern Art in New York
recently acquired 23 photographs from AW Asia.
With Farber and Warsh circulating in Beijing for a variety of
purposes, it was easy for Chinese artists to become confused about
who was buying for whom and for what purpose. In recent interviews,
several artists—most notably Zhang Xiaogang, who had an agreement
with Warsh—pointed to him as an example of a speculator.
Warsh replies, "While some artists are not so pleased with their
decision to have sold quantities of artwork at what was then their
current values not so long ago, there are many artists who are not
resentful and actually pleased that someone has taken an interest in
their work."
New York dealer Jack Tilton, who has worked with Chinese artists
since 1999, says, "All of these artists are hoping that their work
finds good homes rather than getting churned in the commercial
market. But they have also played a part in this market, embracing
capitalism more than we have, in funny ways. They are not naive about
any of this stuff."
When asked about the artists' reactions to the sale of his
collection, Farber was flabbergasted: "So what? Now I am the bad guy.
That pisses me off!"
A number of major collectors of Chinese contemporary art who have
been in the field for some time are holding on to their collections.
Uli Sigg, Swiss ambassador to China, Mongolia, and North Korea from
1995 to 1998, has built a collection of key works that he has toured
in the exhibition "Mahjong" to museums throughout Europe and, most
recently, the University of California's Berkeley Art Museum
(September 10–January 4). Belgian collectors Guy and Myriam Ullens
have used their resources to establish the first nonprofit
contemporary-art center in Beijing, where they are currently
exhibiting their historic collection. So far, collector Charles
Saatchi has been hanging on to his purchases in preparation for
opening his new gallery in London on the 9th of next month with a
show of Chinese contemporary art; he has also launched a Chinese-
language Web site on which mainland artists can post their works.
In comparison with Western buying, mainland Chinese participation
pales. Though there are many rumors about the power of the new
Chinese buyers, their presence has not been felt in the major auction
houses, where most of the records are being set. "Hong Kong right now
covers the global buyers, especially those from across Asia," says
Eric Chang, Christie's international director of Asian contemporary
art. "I am not really seeing mainland Chinese buyers—less than 10
percent—a drop from around 12 percent." Dealers in China also have
seen few mainland collectors among their regular clients. "I don't
know yet about collectors," says New York dealer Christophe Mao of
Chambers Fine Art, which recently opened a branch in Beijing.
Despite the current shortage of mainland art collectors, China is
emerging as a major art center, having become a hub for buyers from
South Korea, Taiwan, Singapore, Indonesia, and Southeast Asia, and
for overseas Chinese from all over the world. Reflecting this
diversity is the wide range of foreign dealers among the 300
galleries in Beijing, including Continua from Italy, Urs Meile from
Switzerland, Arario and PKM from South Korea, Beijing Tokyo Art
Projects from Japan, and Tang from Indonesia.
"In Beijing it's getting increasingly difficult to talk about the
Chinese market as a separate entity from the broader Asian art market
or the international art market," says Meg Maggio, an American who
came to China in 1988 and ran one of the first galleries in the
country, CourtYard, in Beijing, from 1998 to 2006. Now she has her
own gallery, Pékin Fine Arts, where she represents an international
stable of artists. "How do you describe the market for a Korean
artist showing in China or a Chinese artist living in New York?" she
asks, noting that her business can come from South Korean collectors
visiting Beijing or European companies doing business in China.
One factor in China's development as a center for contemporary art is
the proliferation of art fairs. Beijing has two, the China
International Gallery Exposition and Art Beijing; Shanghai has the
newly created ShContemporary, now in its second year; and Hong Kong
just launched ART HK. CIGE director Wang Yihan says her fair
attracted 40,000 visitors this year, while the more high-toned
ShContemporary brought in 25,000 and ART HK 08 had 19,000. These
numbers may seem small in comparison with the 60,000 who crowd Art
Basel, but dealers believe that the fairs in Asia are worthwhile
because they attract new buyers and make Asian collectors feel more
comfortable about acquiring art from galleries.
"Anywhere else, a fair is just a fair," says Lorenz Helbling of
ShanghART, one of the oldest galleries in China and a participant in
Art Basel. "But in Shanghai a fair feels like so much more because
only there can it make an impact on several million people." He is
referring not only to attendance but to the intensive publicity and
official recognition given to ShContemporary in its inaugural year.
Just a few years ago it would have been impossible to try to sell
contemporary art to Asian buyers, let alone mainland Chinese
collectors, in the public forum of an art fair. Now, with the
astounding success of Chinese contemporary art, collectors from
across the region—and more than a few from the United States and
Europe—are targeting China as a destination. According to Nick
Simunovic, who has opened an office and showroom for Gagosian Gallery
in Hong Kong, it is only a matter of time before these regional
buyers turn their attention to Western contemporary art.
"My sense is that wherever you have tremendous wealth creation, the
collecting cycle goes through three phases," he says. "First, people
collect their cultural patrimony, and then they collect their own
contemporary art. I think the final stage is when they gain a more
globalized contemporary-art approach."
Gagosian first considered opening an office in Shanghai but
encountered obstacles to doing business on the mainland. The most
formidable of these is a 34 percent luxury tax on art, which foreign
galleries that participated in ShContemporary found difficult to
avoid. Hong Kong, by comparison, is a duty-free zone. And Simunovic
found that even Jeff Koons was a tough sell in Shanghai, whereas Hong
Kong offers more possibilities for Western contemporary art. Just a
year ago Hong Kong billionaire Joseph Lau paid $72 million for Andy
Warhol's Green Car Crash (Green Burning Car I). In May Christie's
brought a Warhol portrait of Mao, valued at $120 million and for sale
privately, for viewing in Hong Kong. (At press time it had not yet
been sold.)
"Sure, China is hot, but that's just the peak of the iceberg," says
Lorenzo Rudolf, former director of Art Basel and cofounder of
ShContemporary. "This is not just about a group of Chinese painters.
It's about a growing market going on in this continent."
With the sheer abundance of galleries, auction houses, and art fairs
in China, the larger art world is recognizing the power of the Asian
market. Standing in an auction house in New York or London watching
paintings by Chinese artists sell for millions, one can grouse about
this boom and hint that it will turn out to be a bubble. But
strolling in a bustling gallery district in Beijing, with students
and tourists crowding the cafés and boutiques and filling the huge
art showrooms, few would predict a downturn in the near future.
Barbara Pollack is a contributing editor of ARTnews.
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