TOP 3 Artprice 2011: Having emerged as the world’s strongest art marketplace last year, it comes as no surprise to find China’s two leading artists now holding the top two places in Artprice’s global ranking of artists by auction revenue.br
Some interesting background on China’s auction powerhouse, Beijing Poly International.
As I mentioned in a blog post back in June, one of the big stories of the Spring Auctions held in Beijing and Hong Kong was the $65,399,350 paid for a painting by Qi Baishi, “Eagle Standing on a Pine Tree with Four-character couplet in Seal Script” at China Guardian Auctions on May 22nd. A truly astounding price and frankly, hard to understand. True, its provenance was impressive. Qi Baishi intended it as a gift for Chiang Kai-shek’s 60th birthday, and the seller was well-known Shanghai billionaire collector Liu Yiqian. But who was the buyer?? Much has been made of the China’s booming economy and rapidly expanding class of millionaires and billionaires. However, there is another explanation that has less to do with passion for art or even conspicuous consumption. As it turns out the buyer was a corporation, not an individual collector. Artron.net has reported that the Hunan TV & Broadcast Intermediary Co. Ltd. purchased the painting, adding it to a collection of hundreds of ink and oil paintings by modern masters. That the buyer is a corporation lends support to the idea that the current Chinese art market is speculative, and that it is investment groups and corporations that are driving the Chinese art market into the stratosphere. According to a recent article “investing” cash in the Chinese art market is looking even more attractive to Chinese tycoons and corporations due to an overheated real estate market. This along with growing inflation and low interest rates leaves few investment options in China.
Hazy and hot in Beijing, and the same might be said about the Chinese auction market where backroom dealing may be driving the extraordinary high prices paid at auction. On Monday and Tuesday I attended the preview of Beijing Poly’s Spring sales and was astonished at the volume and quality of Chinese art available.
There will be sales of everything from fine Chinese wine to antique automobiles and jewelry to more traditional categories of porcelains, jades, lacquer, furniture, ink painting and works by contemporary Chinese artists. I felt like a kid in a candy store having the opportunity to handle exquisite and rare Ming and Qing porcelains like this imperial washbasin which sold for close to $US4 million, lacquers, jades etc…
The modern ink painting exhibit was wonderful with masterful works by artists very familiar to Western collector such as Lin Fengmian, Zhang Daqi, Wu Guanzhong, Qi Baishi, as well as with works by artists famous in China but less known in the West, such as Zhang Ding, Fan Zeng and Zhou Sicong (1939-1995) whose painting, “Miners”, sold for around US$2.5 millon. What really drew me to Beijing Poly’s Spring Auctions was the sale of part of the Ullens Collection of contemporary Chinese art. The Ullens are Belgian collectors who established the Ullens Center at 798 Art District and are in the process of shifting their focus from Chinese art to contemporary Indian art for reasons that would be a good subject for a future blog post.
