The Chinese Furniture Market

The Financial Times has a good article on antique Chinese furniture.  Chinese furniture prices are now reaching record highs.  The article states that in the past European and US collectors were the driving force for prices.  That has now changed and the biggest collectors are now the wealthy mainland Chinese.

The most desirable furniture are those made with exotic woods such as "huanghuali, a yellow-toned rosewood; zitan, a purple-coloured wood; and jichimu, translated as “chicken-wing wood”, which has grain patterns that look like bird feathers."

The FT reports 

Top-quality Chinese antique furniture has always commanded impressive prices but in the past 10 years, it has reached record highs. Last year, Sotheby’s and Christie’s reportedly raised more than $460m from sales of Chinese art and antiques. And last December, a Chinese furniture collection fetched $12.8m at Bonhams auction house in San Francisco. Originally much of the buying was in Europe and the US but these days, dealers say it is super-rich mainland Chinese who are dominating the market. As a result many dealers and collectors in Europe and the US are being forced to diversify their collections.

Jerry Janssen has run an oriental antiques business in San Francisco for more than 40 years. The city’s huge Chinese community dates back to the 1850s and its Asian Art Museum houses one of the most extensive collections of Chinese antiquities in the US. Although it was once an ideal place for his business, Janssen says he has witnessed dramatic changes in the Chinese furniture market and describes himself as “one of the last of the dinosaurs”. Because of high shipping costs and an increasing demand for top-quality furniture from Chinese buyers, many local antiques operations have gone out of business.

Janssen struggles to get the pieces he was previously able to source and has branched out to antiques from other parts of Asia. “[Previously] we could go over there and get wonderful things for little money and bring them over here and make a profit,” says Janssen. “Now it goes in the opposite direction. Chinese buyers are over here buying everything and taking it back over there. We have been pillaging China for a long time and now the Chinese have a say. So the prices rise and then you see less of it in interiors because it is too expensive for the average designer to place.”

Source: The Financial Times