Chinese art may face trouble as prices soar

“The only way the market is sustainable is if there’s enough wealth here and China wants to buy China (art),” Moses said. “That is, you can’t have a great contemporary collection without having a Yue Minjun. If that’s the case, then it will continue.”

Yue’s trademark of maniacally grinning men has become a staple of contemporary Chinese art collections. Some find his paintings repetitive or facile, but Moses noted that similar criticism has not dented prices for Andy Warhol’s work.

“If this is the current Warhol, if this is the rule of thumb, then this is quality,” he said. “It doesn’t matter if you find it boring.”

The success stories of Yue, Zeng Fanzhi, Liu Xiaodong and others have left young artists with dollar signs in their eyes. Just out of college, they are demanding very high prices for untested works, an indication of a bubble, Sotheby’s Zhang said.

“There’s no validation from curators. The valuation is problematic,” she remarked.

Investors face added uncertainty because of China’s reputation for fakes and poor authentication. Workshops near Hong Kong, known for reproductions of Western art, have started giving the same treatment to their native arts. Knock-offs may be seeping into the market.

Accusations have also been leveled that Chinese investors throw money behind young artists, then bid up their prices and cash out.

Money scene

Flourishing arts are still relatively new to modern China.

The country’s rich painting and ceramics traditions gave way to socialist realism after the Communist revolution in 1949. In the 1980s, as the government threw itself into economic reform, space opened for artists and they began to push the boundaries.

Their experimentation has delivered a rich bounty, best captured at Beijing’s 798, a warren of thriving galleries in an old industrial estate built by East Germany.

Yet there are laments that rocketing prices have distorted the scene.

“In the past, there were lots of pure collectors,” said Dong Guoqiang, chairman of Council International Auction in Beijing, a somewhat odd job for a critic of what he sees as the culture of ROI, or return on investment.

“That practice of collecting art as art has disappeared. People are focusing more on investment and ROI than the joy of art,” he said.

The seemingly insatiable demand for Chinese contemporary art has catapulted Hong Kong into third place among the world’s auction centers behind New York and London.

Jerome Sans, director of the Ullens Center of Contemporary Art, a non-profit art center in Beijing, thinks it sad that the soaring prices garner so much attention, reducing the actual content to little more than an afterthought.

Yue and his peers offer a lens on China’s breakneck economic development and the pollution, corruption and repression intertwined with it.

“Chinese artists capturing this transitional period in an original, critical way. Their work will still be very interesting in a couple of decades,” Sans, an art industry veteran, said.

With a wave, he dismissed the idea that the market is a fragile bubble.

“Once Chinese collectors start to collect intensively, it will not end soon,” he said. “It’s the explosion of a new era here, so what we see, I think, is just a little start.”

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