Fledgling art market

Hu Guoling, 33, will never forget the day her artwork turned into money for the first time.

During the '99 China Art Exposition in Beijing last September, three of her oil paintings were purchased by a local collector for 30,000 yuan (US$3,600).

"That's an amazing experience -the art market is just so close to everyone of us," said the excited artist from Northeast China's Heilongjiang Province.

Hu is right. A vibrant art market is taking shape in contemporary China, where the arts are prospering and the market economy is encouraged.

In the forms of art fairs, galleries, auctions, exhibitions and private sales, the Chinese art market presents boundless opportunities and allure for many: artists, collectors, dealers and critics.

However, it also has been a headache for the policy-makers who take pains to regulate its practice, for the artists who can hardly strike a balance between art and money, and for many innocent investors who lose heavily in this unusual arena.

"The most remarkable signals of China's maturing art market are the appearance of contemporary Chinese art in the market, the wide recognition of artwork's economic value and the market's transformation from foreigner-oriented to local-oriented," said Fan Di'an, an art critic and vice-president of the Beijing-based Central Academy of Fine Arts.

From 1949, when New China was founded, to the late 1970s, works of art were primarily collected by State-owned museums, galleries and other public organizations. Private art collections were operated on an semi-underground basis or not through purchase in a real sense - collectors usually asked for works of art from artists.

The sales of artwork were mostly limited to State-owned art galleries such as Rongbaozhai in Beijing, or some shops of cultural relics scattered in major cities. Most of them sold antiques or ancient works of art, rather than contemporary art.

As a result of China's reform and opening up during the early 1980s, art galleries and shops have mushroomed all over the country, with the total number reaching about 3,000 today. They mostly sell artwork by contemporary Chinese artists.

Noticeably, a few galleries in the Chinese mainland, such as Beijing's Red Gate and Courtyard and ShanghART in Shanghai, are run by Western gallerists. Together with Hong Kong and Taiwan galleries such as Hanart and Schoeni, they set examples in China for their management in accordance with international practices.

Since the first art auction in Shenzhen in 1991, auctions have been in vogue in the mainland, with the emergence of more than 100 art auction houses. Among the most well-known are Guardian in Beijing and Duoyunxuan in Shanghai.

Each year, about 1 billion yuan (US$120 million) worth of artwork sales are realized in China, according to statistics.

But, according to Fan, the most eye-catching part of China's art market is the art fairs that have been active since 1993, when the first Guangzhou International Art Fair was held. Art fairs, he said, involve almost all aspects of the art market in current China.

Today, besides in Hong Kong and Taiwan, international art fairs are organized annually in Beijing, Shanghai and Guangzhou. Very recently, Dalian, a coastal city in Northeast China's Liaoning Province, became the fourth city in the Chinese mainland to host an international art fair.

Fan said a conspicuous change in China's art fairs in the past few years is the increasing number of galleries that represent artists. In the past, participants of art fairs were primarily individual artists selling their own artwork, which Fan said is "harmful for the healthy development of the art market mechanism."

To attract more galleries from home and abroad, the sales tax at the art fairs dropped from 50 per cent in 1993 to its current 19 per cent, Fan noted.

Investment in art has become the third heated point in China's market economy, following stock exchange and real estate, said Ma Hongzeng, an art researcher and deputy director of the Jiangsu Art Museum, in an article published in the Beijing-based Art Observation magazine.

Art sales in China each year hit about 2 billion yuan (US$240 million), Ma said. Most of the sales are made in major cities such as Beijing, Shanghai, Nanjing, Guangzhou, Chengdu, Hangzhou, Tianjin, Xi'an, Zhengzhou, Changsha, Suzhou, Shenzhen and Zhuhai. Hong Kong, Taipei and Macao are also important centres of art sales.

"Nowadays, mainland cities such as Beijing and Shanghai have gradually taken the place of overseas art centres such as New York and Taipei as world centres of Chinese art sales," said Shao Dazhen, an art critic and professor at the Central Academy of Fine Arts.

Before 1997, most buyers of Chinese art were from Japan, the United States, Europe, Southeast Asia and regions such as Hong Kong and Taiwan.

Today, private collectors and enterprises from the Chinese mainland are playing an increasingly dynamic role in the market, Shao said, citing as an example Guo Qingxiang, a collector from Dalian.

A former furniture salesman, Guo focuses on collecting Chinese paintings from the 20th century. Many of the paintings cost him more than 1 million yuan (US$120,000) each. His huge collection of works by Chinese master painters - among them Qi Baishi, Xu Beihong, Zhang Daqian, Fu Baoshi and Li Keran - is expected to become the primary part of the collection in a new art museum to be established in Dalian.

The growing importance of domestic art buyers can be partly attributed to China's rapid economic growth along with people's increasing desire for art appreciation, as well as the Southeast Asian financial crisis that has prevented many overseas collectors from buying art, experts say.

"The rise of domestic collectors, in a way, is good for protecting and developing Chinese heritage while guiding the artistic creation and appreciation in contemporary China," Shao Dazhen said.

Shao criticized that, for a time, the artistic tastes of many artists in China were very commercialized, being misled or affected by some Southeast Asian art buyers who were more concerned about making profit than with artistic quality.

Some artists, on the other hand, made artwork that was overly political to meet the taste of certain Western collectors who were more interested in ideological conflicts than art, experts say.

Despite the maturing domestic market system, the sales volume of Chinese art since the autumn of 1997, however, has remained low because of the decline in Southeast Asian buyers and, above all, the large amount of fake art flooding into the market.

Collectors and investors are becoming increasingly critical and cautious in buying artwork, which, according to Shao, requires extraordinary "connoisseurship, courage and financial capacity."

Experts urge improved art legislation and strengthened law enforcement to regulate the art market and fight production and sales of fake artwork. Authoritative authentication organizations must be established across the country as soon as possible, they suggest.

Some experts also criticize the practice by certain artists who prefer to sell their artwork on their own, either privately or in public.

This has led to considerable tax evasion, affected their own artistic creation and made it difficult for the art representative and agent system to develop in China. As a result, galleries find them hard to survive and prices of artwork remain random, experts point out.

Date: 03/27/2000
Author: YANG YINGSHI, China Daily staff
Copyright? by China Daily

| Events | People | Reviews | Others | dddd