China's Red Hot Art Market
SHANGHAI - Like everything else in China these days, the contemporary art market is red hot and everyone wants a piece of it.
So when a small group of people arrive at her airy gallery in trendy Moganshan Lu, co-director Elisabeth de Brabant breaks off an interview to show them around.
The men and women look and dress like American tourists. They probably are American tourists. They are also prospective buyers, and de Brabant equips them with an overview of the latest on the Chinese arts scene and a bag full of catalogues featuring young hopefuls from the Art Scene Warehouse stable.
International buyers account for about 90 per cent of the current interest and investment in mainland Chinese art, creating a market worth about $36 billion a year, when everything from ceramics to modern pop art is taken into account, the country's cultural ministry estimates.
Some buyers are outrageously savvy like British collector, gallery owner and star-maker Charles Saatchi.
Others are just exuberant amateurs, hoping perhaps to discover a new Damien Hirst and buy up his entire inventory before anyone else hears about him.
At the very top end of China's contemporary art market -- considered nose-bleed territory for living artists -- is figurative painter Liu Xiaodong, who came up through Beijing's Central Academy of Fine Arts, one of the three major arts schools in China. Last November, Liu sold a painting for $2.75 million.
But there are hundreds and hundreds of other young Chinese artists who are winning prizes and snagging shows at home, in Europe and in North America. In short, they are doing everything possible to grab the attention of collectors looking for the next new thing.
"The Chinese contemporary arts scene is very young," de Brabant explains. Galleries scout the countryside looking for artists. "We're talking to artists, asking about their friends, talking to profs."
She describes the scene as fresh but in some ways immature. "There's nothing aggressive or sensational yet, like in North American or Europe."
But there is a Wild West aspect to contemporary art in China that you don't see too often in developed markets. The scene is so new and so unregulated that stars can emerge overnight, and burn out just as quickly.
De Brabant, who arrived in Shanghai via New York City, comes from "an art family." She describes them as "collectors and involved in museums."
It all seems very upper crust until the petite blond demonstrates there's still some Powell River, B.C., lumberjack left in her MacMillan(-Bloedel) blood.
"The Chinese have a very commercial side," she begins, benignly enough, describing some of the murkier aspects of the Chinese art market. But in the next breath she adds: "There's a lot of crap out there."
De Brabant talks of copycat artists and formula painters. But she seems most offended when she tells of galleries that exist for no other reason than to artificially drive up the value of an artist's works with phoney sales so they can put the paintings up for outside auction and cash in on the inflated market they've created.
In 1978, when Deng Xiaoping opened China to market forces, the light shone in on an art scene that
hadn't changed much in the four decades or so since Mao's Long March. Art was executed in traditional inks, watercolours and oils, and the themes were patriotic, political and social.
Predictably, there had to be healing before anything really new could emerge and work produced in the early 1980s is often referred to as the "art of the wounded," because of its grim depictions of the harm done by the Cultural Revolution.
By the mid-1980s, however, art became more experimental and politically edgy. Change was in the air in China and a group of artists that became known as the 85 Movement was in the vanguard. Unfortunately, their brush with freedom of expression ended abruptly in Tiananmen Square in 1989. Nothing close to it has emerged since.
When China's artistic life re-emerged a half-dozen years later, a new school of art duly surfaced. It's been called "cynical realism" or "political pop" by some, and dismissed by many as just too transparently consumer-oriented.
Canadian Sami Wafa was among the contemporary art pioneers when he moved his four-year-old Art Scene gallery from Hong Kong to Shanghai in 2001.
Then, when he opened Art Scene Warehouse in 2003, he led the way to the little arts colony that has since developed along the banks of Suzhou Creek. About 20 galleries have joined him there in the past two years.
This kind of frenzied growth is happening everywhere in the Chinese art market and is, understandably, leading to talk of a bubble.
A bubble that could burst.
De Brabant doesn't dismiss the idea, but she's generally optimistic about contemporary Chinese art.
"Of course there is a bubble (but) ...
I don't see it bursting as much as I see it maturing and settling down a bit. There is a lot of talent coming through. There is definitely fluff, too, but I see that falling away."
Other, far bigger players are also betting that the Chinese art market is worth long-term consideration and commitment.
It was the art world's equivalent of a papal blessing when the head of Paris's prestigious Pompidou Centre confirmed last week that plans remain afoot to open a Pompidou gallery in Shanghai, despite bureaucratic setbacks that many thought had nixed the project.
"We are not in a hurry," Alain Seban told reporters pressing for the kind of firm dates that are often difficult to come by in China. He said, however, that the Pompidou remains "very interested by China, and Shanghai in particular."
