Art.view: China syndrome

Buoyed by bidding from South-East Asia, the market for Chinese fine art is boomingANYONE who believes the art market has been felled by the financial crisis should have been in New York earlier this month for the seasonal auctions of Chinese bronzes, furniture and ceramics. The salerooms at Sotheby's and Christie's were overflowing with bidders, more than three-quarters of them from Hong Kong, mainland China and Taiwan. Extra Mandarin-speakers, all of them fluent and young, had been taken on specially to handle additional telephone bidding from Asia.

Editor's note: This is part of GlobalPost's two-part series about China's Poly Group. Read Part 2 about Poly's powerful art auction house.

A banner month for London's art and antiques fairsIT IS either an embarrassment of riches or overkill. Either way, the abundance of art fairs in London this June is a dramatic departure from how things looked a year ago. Then, London's prestigious Grosvenor House Antiques and Fine Art Fair was closed down after 75 years. Pundits blamed the bad economy. The actual reason was that the owners of the Grosvenor House Hotel believed they could earn more by using the space for other purposes.

Heartening contemporary art sales in London

Imperial connections prove a goldmine at recent sales in Hong KongTHE uneven response to Sotheby’s contemporary Asian art sale in Hong Kong on October 6th seemed inauspicious. Buyers apparently suspected the market still had further to fall. But the blues had vanished two days later with the sale of fine furniture and ceramics.

In June, a Chinese entrepreneur bid $46 million at a Beijing auction for a landscape of red mountains, a painting inspired by a Chairman Mao poem.   The work by artist Li Keran was among the year’s top international sales, beating out masterpieces by Monet and Warhol.   It was the kind of heady Chinese auction price the art world has grown accustomed to, especially after China was listed on one major ranking as the world’s largest art market last year. But 2012 brought few other big sales as the months wore on, and worry set in.  

Asian collectors rediscovering their roots are expected to be among the big buyers at New York auctions next week highlighting ancient and modern works from Asia.Christie's leads Asian Art Week, which takes place in March and September, with 1,200 lots from India to Japan auctioning at an estimated collective price tag of between 46 and 65 million dollars.Rival auction house Sotheby's follows suit with pre-sale estimates of six to 8.8 million dollars for 112 lots, while more than a dozen city galleries are hosting exhibitions and sales of their own.

With experience, Chinese buyers are becoming picky as well as choosyBUYING art at auction, along with watches and wine, has become so popular in Asia that it is taken as given that sales in Hong Kong will always be characterised by “more”—more lots, more bidders, more buyers and, of course, more money in the form of more record prices.