China and the Art Market

We have all witnessed the great growth of the Chinese economic machine over the past several years.  The Chinese have also been active participants in the art market, especially the Chinese and oriental sectors. Souren Melikian writing for the NY Times has an excellent article on the Chinese art market, reviewing the sales of the recent Asia week in NY.

The Oriental art sector, especially at the top end has seen little of the turmoil seen in other sectors over the past 6 months to a year. Melikian notes that in recent past the Chinese were of course players in the sector, but were not dominating the buying. That is starting to change, with many major western collections and collectors, but a very fast a growing group of Chinese collectors as well.

Melikian notes

Judging from last week’s buying binge in New York, which the Chinese attended in such large numbers that Christie’s decided to hold the auction in the vast room usually reserved for Impressionist and Contemporary art, the days when Westerners with a great eye and the required cash could amass fabulous hoards of Chinese art are probably over. Roughly two thirds of the 611 lots that came on the block in a mammoth two-day sale went to Chinese dealers and collectors. They bought across the board, in every category, at every financial level.

The ultimate symbol of the fierce Chinese determination to buy back their art that strayed to the West in the quasi-colonial days of the 19th and early 20th century is the acquisition of a hand scroll titled Chan Yue tu, “Happiness through Chan Practice,” which was signed by Yu Zhiding in the early 1700s. Professional circles are convinced that the buyer is Liu Yiqian, the Shanghai billionaire. Estimated by Christie’s to be worth $120,000 to $150,000 plus the sale charge, the hand scroll made $3.44 million.

Its acquisition epitomizes the complex mix of motivations driving Chinese buyers. The painting was one of many works consigned by the Los Angeles collector Robert Blumenfield. It had earlier been in the possession of Xiang Hanping, a general in the nationalist army whose collector’s seal dated 1934 appears on the frontispiece. This provenance made the recovery of the painting doubly desirable.

To read the full NY Times article, click HERE.