China’s new rich in $256 million auction

Singapore — Chinese collectors are expected to spend $256 million at an auction that should see the work of local artists fetching record prices.The sale, which opens next weekend in Hong Kong, will also provide a stark illustration of the new distribution of global wealth as the West suffers.In recognition of the rise of a new generation of Asian super-rich, eager to own Asian cultural artifacts once traded in London or New York, Sotheby’s has shifted all of its sales of Asian art to Hong Kong.In five days of selling, the auctioneer expects to set a local record of $256 million.The “Chinese Contemporary” category is the most rapidly appreciating segment of the global art market.Quek Chin Yeow, Sotheby’s deputy director for Asia, believes that China’s new wealth has coincided with a creative blossoming.“All great art needs a great movement,” he said.In China’s case that was provided by the transformation of society as it emerged from the strictures of Maoism in the 1980s.“It’s so big and so phenomenal that a lot of [Chinese] collectors are buying their own [Chinese] art,” Mr Quek said. “Of course they would.”Mary Dinaburg, whose company Fortune Cookie promotes the Asian art trade, said: “This is the beginning of China’s modern art history. When they buy these works, what they are doing is collecting their own history.”Her business partner, Howard Rutkowski, referred to the “craziness” of a market in which an artist not found in any museum collection can sell for $1 million. So frantic is the appetite for Chinese Contemporary painting that the record price for a work has been broken three times in the past year. It currently stands at $9.5 million, fetched by Zeng Fanzhi’s “Mask Series 1996 No. 6” at Christie’s in Hong Kong in May.A work by Damien Hirst might still be more expensive, but prices for China’s top artists have already surpassed giants of contemporary Western art such as Jeff Koons.The explosion of the Chinese art scene was as unexpected as it was rapid. According to Mr. Quek, when Sotheby’s started its Asian Contemporary category in 1999 it identified Indonesian painting as the most interesting school. But the Southeast Asian and Indian art markets have been dwarfed by China.Almost every sale throws up a new price record. Since the beginning of the decade, Sotheby’s Hong Kong sales values have increased fivefold. Last year China overtook France as the world’s third-biggest art market, after America and Britain.It is not only contemporary art that will be going under the hammer. Chinese antiques — once the preserve of Western connoisseurs — now do better in the East.

China’s new rich in $256 million auction

China’s new rich in $256 million auction

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