A Dalliance With Dali

Collectors from the region seem to have had their fill of contemporary Chinese art and moved on to the best from the West. Chitralekha Basu reports from Hong Kong.??

The Le Corbusiers, Renoirs and Picassos are on their way back to London, having touched base with Beijing, Shanghai, Taipei and Hong Kong.

Bringing the highlights of a major art auction to be held in New York or London to China for a preview is not new - Christie's held its Hong Kong show on Jan 17, while the Sotheby's preview ran from Feb 14 to 16 - but the volume and value of this eastbound traffic gets bigger by the year.

Many of these touring artworks are blue-chip, museum-worthy pieces - representative, epoch-defining creations by the giants of Western art.

The previews present a rare opportunity to see a Marc Chagall or a Rene Magritte, held in private hands, in person. And while not every viewing will translate into a headline-making sale, auction houses are pulling out all the stops to woo prospective buyers from the region, many of whom - having collected the finest in contemporary Chinese art - are looking westwards.

As the world's leading auctioneers lay out their offerings for the evening sales of impressionist and modern art in London - Christie's on Feb 28, Sotheby's on March 1 - Chinese collectors are no longer just a peripheral presence on this scene.

"Buyers from the region represent a very, very large proportion of the activity that we see in auctions in both New York and London," said Simon Stock, senior director of Impressionist and Modern Art at Sotheby's. "Transporting these works of art to Asia isn't inexpensive, so we wouldn't do it if there wasn't a good business case for it."

There is reason to believe that the emerging buyers who have begun to warm to the Western canon will evolve into influential collectors, he said. "Collectors from both Hong Kong and the Chinese mainland are not necessarily buying at the highest level. But even to have the liquidity to buy something worth $300,000 to $600,000 is quite extraordinary, and shows that there is massive potential there."

Christie's is also interested in these big-time collectors of the future. "We have been bringing more art meant for our London and New York sales to Asia than ever before," said Elaine Holt, senior vice-president of Impressionist and Modern Art at Christie's. "Prospective collectors often come to have a look and process the information. These could be our future buyers," she added.

Such optimism is an acknowledgement of both the economic might and growing awareness of Western art, especially the classic genres, in the region. After all, quite a few iconic paintings by the 19th and 20th century masters of European art have found a home in this part of the world.

A collector of Claude Monet's work in Hong Kong loaned his possessions to a major exhibition of the artist's works at the Hong Kong Heritage Museum last year. "A Cezanne landscape was bought by a buyer from Asia recently who picked up the piece from a London sale, but had seen it here in Christie's Hong Kong gallery," Holt said. "Also, a very high-value Picasso was purchased by a buyer from Asia. All of this happened in the last three years.

Stock, of Sotheby's, has also seen a spike in local interest. "We sold a Camille Pissarro work on paper to someone from Asia in our June auction in London. That was a direct result of our viewing in Hong Kong. That's just one example from many," he said. "I think Dali is a superstar in Asia."

At the Hong Kong debut of London auction house Phillips in November, Gerhard Richter's Abstraktes Bild 776-1 was sold for HK$19,880,000 ($2.5 million).

"(It was) the highest price achieved for the artist at an auction in Hong Kong," said Phillips' deputy chairman in Asia, Jonathan Crockett. "Roy Lichtenstein's Landscape with Grass sold for HK$35,480,000, exceeding the high estimate," he added.

Gen-Y collectors

More high-value works by masters of Western art are being sold on the quiet in Hong Kong, without the high drama and public spectacle seen at auctions. Internationally active dealers in some of the finest art from Europe and the Americas - including blue-chip material - seem to have found a steady clientele in the tax haven of Hong Kong.

Mathieu Ticolat, of Ticolat Tamura Ltd, who sold a figurative work by Picasso to a buyer from the Chinese mainland last year, said the deal would have made headlines if the piece had been sold at an auction, "but art dealers like us as well as our buyers like to keep things quieter. We also charge far less commission than the auction houses do."

Ticolat, who has also sold works by Monet and Pissarro in the recent past, said there is a lot of interest in acquiring pieces by Jean-Michel Basquiat, Jean Dubuffet and Alberto Giacometti.

The collector demographic is becoming progressively younger, with the number of buyers in their 20s and 30s having grown by about 20 percent in the last five years.

"The really affluent among them want only the very best. And they would go for the big names if money weren't an issue," Ticolat said, adding that the difference between Gen-Y collectors and their predecessors is that "the newer and younger buyers are savvy, well-informed and ask a lot of questions.

"Also compared with the heavyweight buyers who came before them, they prefer to be more discreet, preferring not to show off their wealth, although the reason for their wanting to collect Western art might be similar to their predecessors: they have money, they have education and now they want to possess the things that signify good taste. Besides, they see spending on blue-chip Western art as a sound investment," he added.

Lure of the big names

Often, one of the reasons for wanting to possess a signature artwork by a well-known artist is the story of its provenance and being able to relive that moment in history by association.

As Holt, from Christie's, pointed out, the paintings by Le Corbusier and Paul Cezanne for sale at the Feb 28 auction in London "are path-breaking works, signifying the beginning of art movements". The new, informed generation of collectors is giving in to the enduring charm of such histories, which are significantly better documented in the Western tradition.

The other less-romantic reason for gravitating from the A-list of contemporary Chinese art towards the Western masters could be that modern Chinese art has past its boom time and few of these works are still circulating in the market.

Most of the collectors now buying Western art "have been very active in the Chinese contemporary art market", said Pascal de Sarthe, founder of the De Sarthe Gallery, who is also a high-profile art dealer with bases in Beijing and Hong Kong. He recalled a time in the recent past when the prices of contemporary Chinese art went through the roof, fuelled by rampant speculation that did not always take the artistic merit of the pieces into consideration.

"Now that collectors have realized that those pricings were driven largely by speculation they have started looking at markets that are more stable, such as those for impressionist art and 20th century modern European," De Sarthe said.

"Collectors also travel a lot, see exhibitions in the Pompidou Centre in Paris and want to buy a Constantin Brancusi sculpture, or visit The Tate in London and want a painting by David Hockney."

Their acquisitive impulse is still triggered by what is trending: "The difference being that they want to go for the hugely established and historically important names."

De Sarthe cautioned against giving into the lure of the biggest and the buzziest: "For $2 million, you can buy a small painting by Warhol or Picasso. You can buy the name, but you may not necessarily get the best piece by the said artist."

Contact the writer at basu@chinadailyhk.com

Kevin Ching (left), chief executive officer of Sotheby's Asia, hands over a still life by Vincent Van Gogh to Wang Zhongjun, who paid $61.8 million for the painting at an auction in Hong Kong.Li Peng / Xinhua