ARTS Hot on the heels of New York’s Asia Week, Hong Kong is launching its spring series of sales. Sotheby’s kicked off with its four-day, 15-sale, 1,600-lot jamboree on Tuesday, and Christie’s will wrap up the season with its marathon event towards the end of May.
In between, Hong Kong will play host to its first top-flight international modern and contemporary art fair, ART HK 08. This initiative offers a shop window to some of the world’s leading galleries and an international platform for the contemporary art of the wider region. Little wonder, perhaps, that Magnus Renfrew, the fair’s director, sounds pretty pleased with things. “The timing of this fair is just right; everything about it makes sense.” The art business in Hong Kong is booming.
Christie’s and Sotheby’s have been staging sales in Hong Kong since the 1980s and while growth has been constant, the accelerated pace of demand for Asian art in recent years has both opened up new collecting categories and pushed up prices in traditional fields. In 2002 market leader Christie’s enjoyed an annual turnover of HK$753.4m; by 2005, sales had broken through the HK$2bn barrier and last year that total soared to HK$3.62bn (US$464m). As an international auction centre, it is outclassed now only by New York and London.
Hong Kong has traditionally staged the auction-houses’ flagship sales of Chinese imperial pieces – all sourced from overseas. There have long been sales of classical paintings, prized jades and porcelains. An indication of just how much prices for such pieces have jumped in recent years is offered by an early Ming pear-shaped vase decorated with meandering peonies, which has taken several bows at auction. In 1988, this 14th-century gem fetched HK$17m; in 1997 it realised HK$22m and in 2006 its price had soared again to HK$78m.
For the growing numbers of wealthy Chinese – these days from mainland China as well as Taiwan, Hong Kong and Singapore – hoping to buy back their patrimony, no price seems to be too high for the exceptional.
This season’s offerings at Sotheby’s have included glorious Imperial porcelains from the Leshantang collection, and an extraordinary collection of rare Ming and Qing Imperial gold vessels.
On May 27 Christie’s will offer a group of 15 clocks made in Europe to delight the Chinese imperial court; arguably the most extravagant timepieces ever made.
Revealingly, Christie’s has chosen Hong Kong over Geneva to present the largest colourless diamond to appear on the auction market in the past 18 years. Demand from mainland China has wrought a noticeable shift of taste in the market, not least since these days Japanese collectors, renowned for their exquisite taste, are more frequent sellers than buyers. Most new Chinese buyers seem to prefer the showy and over-elaborate decorative arts produced for, or during the 18th-century reign of, the Qing emperor Quianlong – as well as modern Chinese painting in the western style. The auction houses are obliging by offering more of both, and south-east Asian painting, too.
Contemporary art is, of course, a collecting area that offers a potentially endless supply. It is also what is most attracting younger collectors. Indeed, recent research carried out by the Hurun Report, a luxury business magazine in China, revealed that collecting contemporary art has become the leading “hobby” among the country’s new rich (the latest Hurun rich list also revealed that there are more US dollar billionaires in China than in any country outside the US, and that the average wealth of its members had doubled since last year to US$562m).
It is little wonder that this week Sotheby’s notched up its highest total ever of Chinese contemporary art (HK$403m, US$51.7m). On May 24, Christie’s is staging Asia’s first-ever evening sale and devoting it to Asian contemporary art and Chinese 20th-century art. “We wanted to send out a strong message that Asian contemporary art can be treated with the same seriousness as western post-war and contemporary art,” explains the company’s Jonathan Stone.
While the collecting of cutting-edge rather than modern Chinese art is a fairly recent phenomenon among Chinese buyers, the collecting of western modern and contemporary art is newer still. “There are a handful of collectors beginning to buy brand names in western art,” says Magnus Renfrew. Perhaps the best known is the Hong Kong property tycoon Joseph Lau, who paid a record US$17.4m for Warhol’s “Chairman Mao” in 2006.
Unlike the mainland, there is no tax on the import or export of works of art in Hong Kong and for the organisers of ART HK, the city offered dealers the obvious Asian platform.
Some 97 exhibitors – 40 per cent of whom are western – are drawn from across the globe. London-based Ben Brown Fine Arts, for instance, will bring Warhol’s 1962 “Avanti Cars” (price HK$29m); Seoul gallery Seomi & Tuus offer Damien Hirst; the Brazilian Campana Brothers come courtesy of London’s Albion Gallery and Peres Projects of Los Angeles and Berlin will stage a solo show of Chinese-Canadian artist Terence Koh. Beijing may be the art capital of China, but Hong Kong still remains its international marketplace.
Art HK 08 runs from May 14-18 at the Hong Kong Convention and Exhibition Centre, www.hongkongartfair.com
