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BIZCHINA> Top Biz News
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China's art market: cold or maybe hibernating?
(The New York Times)
Updated: 2009-03-20 18:08 Artists who have benefited most from this country's rising profile as an arts center are still living in luxury residences and driving BMWs and Mercedes-Benzes. But recently, they've been getting fewer visitors.
"Before, every day visitors would come and knock on the door, and I had to spend the morning taking them around," Zeng said, sitting on a leather sofa in his studio. "Now it's about half as much."
He seems somewhat relieved, however. And experts say the market drop may be salubrious in some ways for Chinese art. Soaring prices had created a circuslike atmosphere, with some artists turning their studios into assembly lines that mass-produced their most popular works. "The market zooming up made a lot of people blind and deaf," said Jérôme Sans, director of the Ullens Center for Contemporary Art in Beijing. "Now, we can have production of the mind, not just the product. No more of this making fast money." A crucial test looms for the small number of international galleries that opened here in recent years in the hope of cashing in on the excitement while also developing long-term projects with Chinese artists. PaceWildenstein of New York, which now represents Zhang Xiaogang and Zhang Huan, two of the country's most respected artists, signed a 10-year lease last year and is preparing to open a 20,000-square-foot gallery in the 798 Arts District in Beijing. "I don't worry about the downturn too much," said Leng Lin, the director of the gallery. "This is a long-term project. In the future, the market will recover." Acquavella Galleries of New York has also invested in China, agreeing to represent Zeng, whose crisp, dark portraits of life and nature are popular among European collectors. And then there are Guy and Myriam Ullens, the Belgian multimillionaires who founded the sprawling Ullens Contemporary Art Center in 2007 after amassing one of the biggest collections of Chinese contemporary art more than a decade ago. Their foundation has recently been shopping that collection, which includes about 1,500 works and is now in Switzerland, to Chinese buyers. But selling a collection that large, possibly as part of a package deal that would include the center they founded in Beijing, may be a challenge. Mr Sans, director of the center, insists that the buyer must be from China. "We're trying to find partners," he said. "We want all the works to stay together and to be controlled by Chinese." Charles Saatchi, the legendary London-based dealer and collector, also invested heavily in Chinese contemporary art in recent years, helping to drive up prices. With collectors hibernating, traffic has slowed in Beijing's 798 Arts District and Shanghai's M50 Arts District, though some say winter is usually a slow time anyway. By April, gallery dealers say, the true extent of the damage may be known. "Collectors call me, but they're more careful about spending," said Cheng Xingdong, who operates a large Beijing gallery. "And because people stopped buying, you don't know the value of the works." The best-known artists may be insulated from the effects of the downturn. Because of their huge exposure in recent years, including newspaper and magazine profiles, many of them now have international reputations and collectors who are still eager to support them. Zeng, who favors European fashions and Chinese antiques, is one of those lucky ones. He's preparing for his first solo exhibition in New York, at the Acquavella Galleries, and another show this spring at the Suzhou Museum, designed by I. M. Pei. He said he was even gratified that he did not sell too many of his paintings over the last few years. If the market were now flooded with his works, he reasons, their value would be far lower. Zeng opened a door to a storage room in the rear of the studio filled with dozens of works and smiled. "That would have been a disaster." (For more biz stories, please visit Industries)
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