wisepowder: China's billionaires set to dominate the world's art market

wisepowder

China's billionaires set to dominate the world's art market



Alexandra Bregman is a teaching associate in business and economics at the Columbia Journalism School. She is author of "The Bouvier Affair: A True Story."To get more china art news, you can visit shine news official website.

The Asian art market is currently dictated by Chinese players. And guess what, America? Soon, China will not need you anymore.

The eastern behemoth's booming economy has equated to staggering art sales this year while America's has faced obstacles. That has much to do with the fact that as other world powers have struggled against COVID-19, October 2020 data compiled by the Hurun Rich List shows that the number of Chinese billionaires is growing at the fastest pace in the country's history.

There are now 878 billionaires under 40 in China -- including 257 newly minted billionaires this year -- worth a total of $4 trillion, breaking their own previous records. After two generations of largely uninterrupted economic boom, 2020 may finally see the death of a once-celebrated Western postcolonial patrimony.

To put this in context, during the Communist Revolution, proletariat art replaced traditional Chinese landscape motifs, while other works synonymous with Imperial China were hidden, exported, or destroyed. Meanwhile, as early as the 17th century, European collectors began acquiring Chinoiserie-silks, porcelains, and furniture-as statement pieces for a worldly estate. This colonialist mentality endured well into the 20th century as Communist China's power grew, but that has slowly started to change.

As China's wealth increased, those stereotypically brash, overzealous Chinese buyers crowding auction houses in New York and London -- deemed an ignorant yet indispensable part of the burgeoning new art market -- were tolerated. After the 2008 financial crisis plunged the U.S. economy into severe recession, Chinese buyers became increasingly important, out of both inevitability and necessity.

From antiquities to contemporary Asian works, Chinese collectors were growing evermore sophisticated when it came to overseas acquisitions, which quickly led to at-home buying behavior to match. Now, China's domestic art market has grown so big that those New York and London auction houses may not be needed to sustain their buying interests.

The game-changing year of 2011 signified the shift, when 11 works worth $100 million were sold in China. Over one two-day period in 2014, Sotheby's Hong Kong team sold $47.5 million worth of contemporary Asian art. Data compiled by Artnet for the year showed a 9% year-on-year increase in auction houses dealing in Chinese art -- the largest jump in Asian art history. Two years later, Sotheby's New York brought in $60.4 million at its September 2016 Asian sale.