Global Coverage ~ Unique Analysis
Rongbaozhai, a 300-year-old art dealership based in Beijing, raised nearly 323 million yuan for its spring auction in Shanghai, following its successful debut auction in the city last autumn with a total amount of 810 million yuan.
This Xu Beihong ink painting sold for 23 million yuan (US$3.68 million)
Ink-wash painting fetches $3 mln at auction (China Daily)
The BBC reports on the death of a Belgian dealer in Chinese antiquities who ran afoul of the authorities and has been under arrest in China for six years.
Kurt de Raedemaeker, 48, died three weeks ago in a Beijing hotel, spokesmen said. He was arrested at Beijing airport in 2006 and later convicted of illegally exporting an ancient sarcophagus, media reports say. He denied any wrongdoing and Belgium had been seeking his repatriation.
Raedemaeker, a sinologist, bought the sarcophagus in Bejing in 2003 and sold it to a US citizen later in the year, according to the Belgian state broadcaster VRT. It is currently on loan to the Guimet Museum in Paris.
In 2008, he was convicted by a court in the western province of Gansu, where the sarcophagus was from. Raedemaeker insisted the transaction was legal and that he had the necessary permits from the Chinese authorities. But the authorities said the sarcophagus, reportedly valued at $1.2m, was a national treasure, and demanded it be returned from abroad.
Belgian art dealer convicted of smuggling in China dies (BBC News)
Li Yaoshen, head of the policy and regulation bureau of the State Administration of Cultural Heritage in China, is taking measures to impose greater supervision over the Chinese market for “cultural relics,” according to China Daily.
A recent case involved a jade furniture set—a dresser and a stool—claimed to date back to the Han Dynasty. After being sold at auction for 220 million yuan ($34.87m) last year, an Internet user wrote a post alleging the jade wares were counterfeit and made by a craftsman surnamed Zhao inn Jiangsu province, and said the true value was about 500,000 yuan.
Although Zhao admitted that he was the maker of the jade furniture later in an interview with Xinhua, the expert who authenticated the object denied that the antique was a fake.
According to Li, the administration will set up a system to manage and regulate authentication certificates of cultural relics and adopt stricter approval procedures for relics auctions by spelling out more concrete and specific requirements on the introduction of the auction items and the responsibilities of auction professionals.
China Vows to Regulate Forgery-Filled Relics Market (ChinaDaily)
The Financial Times adds another wrinkle to the mysteries of the Chinese art market. One of the two defaulting buyers Sotheby’s named today was also acting as a conduit to one of the country’s art exchanges where fractional shares in paintings are sold. The extraordinary prices the bidder paid for the Zao Wou-ki painting she defaulted on raises the possibility that auction prices in China are being bid up to establish public prices for art exchanges:
On October 3, Ren Chunxia, a woman with an address in Jinan, eastern China, won two oil paintings by the Chinese master Wu Guanzhong with bids of HK$18.6m and HK$26.4m respectively. [...] The two [...] paintings were sold to a new owner within days of the auction and listed on the Taishan art exchange at prices more than 30 per cent higher than the sums Ms Ren paid in Hong Kong, local reports said.
Late last year, Chinese officials cracked down on a variety of illegal exchanges, including some art exchanges similar to the Taishan exchange. The Taishan art exchange was not closed. Here’s the Financial Times from November:
Beijing-based Hantang Artworks Exchange, where investors could trade shares in precious artworks owned by the exchange, announced on its website this week that it was halting all trading immediately “in the spirit” of the orders from the State Council.
More than 30 similar art exchanges have sprung up in the last few years but most do not appear to have been very successful and some have been mired in scandal and accusations of fraud from the outset.
Chinese Art Bidders Named in Payment Dispute (Financial Times)
China Cracks Down on Rogue Exchanges (Financial Times)
The Wall Street Journal’s Eben Shapiro is promoting his newspaper’s story on Chinese collectors behaving like Western collectors. They buy; they sell; they form syndicates to buy and sell (by which he must mean art funds.)
Then Shapiro adds one other element (at 2:16) that hasn’t been seen in the West.
“Banks are much more aggressive about loaning money . . . ,” Shapiro says.
At which point, the interviewer, Gwendolyn Bounds corrects him saying, “Over there. Here in the US–and in Europe–they’ve squashed some of that loaning money to buy art. But they’re doing that in China.”
“Yes,” says Shapiro. “Exactly. It was more active here a few years ago but now its really taking off in China.”
The Journal’s story makes no mention of any sort of art loans, either loans against art collections or loans to buy art. And those familiar with the art loan industry will tell you that art loans are generally made against the borrower’s overall net worth, earning stream and the collections as additional assurance or collateral.
Art, for all its risks, has never been a place where leverage played a part. But if Chinese banks are trying to get in on the art party by bankrolling acquisitions, that would indeed be something new
Wealthy Chinese Collectors Snap Up Art (Wall Street Journal)
China’s Xinhua News Agency reports on Poly Auction House’s sale of a Chinese ink painting from mid-20th Century:
An auction in Beijing sold a Xu Beihong painting for 266.8 million yuan (42 million U.S. Dollars) on Monday, smashing previous world records for the father of modern Chinese painting.
The traditional Chinese painting, which portrays three farmers cultivating their land with an ox, [...] measures 150 by 250 cm, was completed in 1951,[and is] his largest work after the founding of the People’s Republic of China in 1949.
The magnum opus was initially sent to Guo Moruo, a Chinese literary and cultural celebrity and close friend of Xu, as a gift, and was later purchased by a collector, who commissioned the sale to the Poly Auction House.
Xu Beihong painting sells for record 42 mln USD in Beijing (Xinhua)
The Financial Times’s Beyond BRICs blog has an interesting post on the Chinese Communist Party’s recently stated goal of promoting Chinese cultural power abroad. Of course, the party’s goal of retaining control over the dissent has been poignantly demonstrated in the harassment of artist Ai Weiwei.
Nonetheless, fine artists have been living within a market context for much longer than many of China’s other culture industries:
China’s leaders appear to be impressed by the huge potential of China’s cultural industry, which is now worth Rmb1,100bn ($173bn) in 2010 and growing at an annual rate of 23 per cent. Even in its seemingly-innocuous non-political divisions, it demands to be taken far more seriously by the country’s rulers.
“China has two targets,” explains John Howkins, vice dean and visiting professor at the Shanghai Theatre Academy’s School of Creativity. “One is to increase its exports of media, entertainment, etc. The other is to ensure they convey a ‘Chinese’ or even a CPC message. In many cases, these are inconsistent.”
As with so many of the reforms enacted over the past three decades, China’s rulers want to encourage free-market capitalism while retaining communist control.
Professor Yuanpu Jin, director of the centre for creative industries at the People’s University of Beijing, says the government will therefore split the industry in two.
“Most of the media and publishing businesses, except those involved in news, current affairs and politics, will be pushed towards the market,” he says.
China’s Culture Power (BeyondBRICs/Financial Times)
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NPR paints a bleak picture of the Chinese art market: “ In all too many cases, the art is fake, the bids are rigged, the experts are crooked, and the bills are never settled. It’s difficult to know what is real, aside from the corruption:”
In one case that was recently exposed, businessman Xie Genrong commissioned a fake ancient jade burial suit made out of pieces of jade stitched together with gold thread. He got five top expert appraisers to vouch for the authenticity of the suit and value it at $375 million. Using that as collateral, a bank gave Xie a $100 million loan for a real estate project.
This saga casts doubt on the role of the appraisers, who work for such august institutions as Beijing’s Palace Museum. Of the five, one has since died, and the other four have blamed him, saying they had to carry out the appraisal of the suit without touching it, while it was in a glass case.
But Zhang Ning, a porcelain appraiser who does not specialize in archaeological objects, says such a valuation should never have been given for a jade burial suit: “For a start, it was violating the law. If it had been unearthed in a dig, there’s a law that says archaeological objects can’t be traded or sold. So the experts should have never given it that estimate. It’s likely the experts knew it was fake.”
The businessman, Xie Genrong, is now serving a jail term.
In Chinese Red-Hot Art Market, Fraud Abounds (National Public Radio)
The Wall Street Journal caps a week of press reports about weak Hong Kong sales (that were anything but weak) with the opposite (overwrought) take. Chinese collectors are taking over the art market! Chinese collectors have become very important in the markets for Chinese works of art. They’re significant players in the wine and jewelry markets too.
As the Journal points out, Chinese tastes and interests are already revaluing objects that Western buyers do not covet such as ink stones and brush pots.
Even if the market for Chinese art is $4b a year, as Sotheby’s CEO William Ruprecht offers in the story, that’s still less than 10% of any conservative guess of the size of the overall art market.
But where the Wall Street Journal does a good job is showing how the shift from international buyers to domestic buyers is changing the practices of working artists. When they turn toward the Mainland Chinese market, there’s more than enough demand to block out foreign buyers:
Liu Dan, who studied in Hawaii and New York, uses traditional ink, pencil and watercolor to paint scholar’s rocks and dictionaries. Mr. Carey, the Missouri art investor, said his consortium paid more than $1 million last year for a “Dictionary” by Mr. Liu; Yahoo co-founder Jerry Yang owns another. New York collector Patty Tang bought a work of his about five years ago, but said mainland Chinese buyers are now catching on: “He moved back to Beijing, and that was it—you can’t get a thing now.”
The China Factor (Wall Street Journal)
The Australian Broadcasting Company in Perth is excited about the success of Aboriginal art in China. Gary Proctor organized a show that started in Shanghai and is now touring the country where it has been seen by more than 100,000 Chinese:
“The aim was to make a virtual bombing run of big museums in China, offering the finest Warburton works in a large selection,” says Proctor jokingly. “We started with Shanghai, then Beijing’s premier contemporary art museum came on board. Then several second-tier cities came forward, and we were off.”
‘Our Land- Our Body’ has been so popular that Xi’An Art Museum – which is currently hosting the exhibition – has offered to further tour the show to six satellite cities in 2013. [...]
Under an explicit community order to keep culture safe, the Warburton Arts Centre has retained some of the best works by local artists over the past twenty years, rather than selling them.
It means that Warburton’s collection, the largest of its kind in Australia, now contains 760 paintings, all linked to a meticulous data base detailing family trees and site locations.
For ‘Our Land- Our Body’, 65 canvasses were selected to tour; they are displayed alongside 6, 500 photographs taken mainly by Aboriginal children and a 24-channel digital audio-visual show. “It’s the largest Australian art exhibition ever to go around China,” says Proctor proudly. “It’s massive.”
From Warburton to China: The Aboriginal art exhibition taking China by storm (ABC)
