Contemporary art market in Asia now bigger than US for first time says Artprice

ASIAN ART MARKET

Visitors enter a Sotheby's auction room in Hong Kong for a sale of modern and contemporary art on October 6, 2008.

For the first time ever, the total auction revenue from “contemporary art in Asia” is greater than the total of the United States artprice reports. The statistics are collected from a 12-month period spanning from July 2008 to June 2009. Asia generated €130 million versus the United States’ €123 million. China is the highest gainer out of this trend, having generated €95 million from contemporary art during the same period.  According to the report, this means China is continuing to “hold on to its third place global geographical art auction revenue ranking.”

The establishment of foreign auction houses such as Christie’s, Sotheby’s and Bonhams in Hong Kong, in combination with the financial strength of Hong Kong and Shanghai are to be accredited for China’s position. For those who are looking to begin collecting Asian art, this does not mean that the price of contemporary Chinese art is back up to its sky-high prices of a couple of years ago. Artprice’s report tell us that in the first half of 2008 the average price of contemporary works sold in China was $65,500, however, in the first half of 2009, this average dropped to $26,800.

Related posts:

• Liquidity propels prices, Chinese Political Pop is back- Sotheby’s Contemporary Asian Art Auction 2009 Hong Kong- October 2009
• Trends and opportunities in the contemporary photography market- October 2009
• Newslink round up Art Basel 2009- Indian, Japanese artists dominate coverage of Asians- June 2009

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RM/KCE

Indian art consultancy threatens to sue US-based internet platform Ning

INDIAN ART NEWS PUBLISHING DISPUTE

The art world in India is being rocked by accusations of libel and defamation and a blog platform in California is being drawn into the battle.

Copal Art, a consultancy in India which provides modern art sourcing services, is threatening California-based service provider Ning with legal action if it fails to close down the publication of blog news site Indian Art News on its platform.

In a letter dated September 4 2009, Indian solicitors S. Jalan and Company served Ning with a Notice of Defamation in which it is claimed that founder Deepak I Shahdadpuri uses Indian Art News to ‘continuously promote scandalous and unfounded and unconfirmed articles against our Client with the malicious intention to defame our Client’.

The letter alleges that ‘it is incumbent (on Ning) as a vicarious liability to check …the unfounded articles’ and calls upon Ning to block Indian Art News from access to its services. Indian Art News denies all allegations.

Indian Art News was founded in 2005 and has more than 600 email subscribers.

Editor’s note:

Art Radar Asia is intrigued by the questions raised: Where is the crossover point between art criticism and defamation? And in this new era of virtual publishing, is an internet service provider also a publisher? Does a blog platform share liability if a news site it hosts is libellous? On what grounds can a third party require a platform to close down a site which it hosts? Do the grounds alter in different geographical jurisdictions?

Indian Art News is one of the sites which provided the initial inspiration for Art Radar Asia. We hope that all three parties are able to resolve differences as soon as possible and with minimal damage.

Read more at Indian Art News.

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India Art Summit sponsor Rajshree Pathy has big plans for new art institute in India

ART EDUCATION MUSEUM INDIA

The Hindu newspaper reports that art collector and co-sponsor of the India Art Summit, Rajshree Pathy is to open an art institute and museum of contemporary art in Coimbatore India by 2011. She has named the entire venture Contemplate. She says:

The art institute will have post-graduate, under-graduate and short certificate courses. We will have a world-class faculty, including those from abroad, and will focus on all kinds of media separately – visual art, video, audio, digital, new media, et al.”

The museum will display works of contemporary artists. To begin with, it will have works mounted from her own collection, from Raza to Rameshwar Broota and Souza to Chintan Upadhyay.

Rajshree Pathy, art collector and co-sponsor India Art Summit

Big plans, big stakes and a big venue says The Hindu but points out that Coimbatore is a city that has had little exposure to art. Rajshree replies rather contemplatively, “Coimbatore is a university area with over 100,000 students. It is peaceful – a must to think and produce art.”

Moreover, the course fees, she promises, will be “very affordable”. “My intention is to spread awareness of art to the masses. Today, our students don’t even know who Raja Ravi Varma is, forget contemporary artists. On the other hand, abroad, even small children are aware of Picasso. This is because art teaching has not been taken seriously at the primary level. We have IT, engineering and medical colleges, but how many art institutes do we have? There is nothing called art journalism in India. Courses on art as a business, how to curate art shows, art appreciation and its aesthetics; there is so much to explore for an art student.”

Discussions on affiliation with foreign faculties are on, and Contemplate is likely to be “fully operational” by 2011. “With a residential programme as an added feature, we also plan to expand to other cities,” says a smiling Rajshree.

Source: The Hindu

Related posts:

• Indian video art – a medium on the rise – interview Bani Abidi – Aug 09
• Which 5 Indian artists would you dare to buy now? – May 09
• Middle Eastern, Indian, Pakistani artists show seminal works in 3 city exhibition: Lines of Control – Feb 09
• Indian contemporary art reaches a new stage of development – Dec 08
• Royal Academy announces Anish Kapoor retrospective London 2009 – Nov 08
• Indian collector Sarkar plans new art museum Calcutta – Sep 08
• Nonprofit museum of art Devi ground-breaking first – Sep 08

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Indian artist Reena Kallat’s work mutates in Mumbai

 

Reena Kallat Crease Crevice Contour

FEMALE ARTIST INDIA

Delhi-born and Mumbai-based artist Reena Saini Kallat (1973), wife of auction star Jitish Kallat, presents  Silt of Seasons at Chemould Prescott Road in Mumbai until 17 January 2009. Her chosen media have ranged from bonded marble to fabric and this love for experimentation has given her portfolio an enviable range, which in turn has made her one of Indian contemporary art’s more successful exports says Time Out Mumbai.

Her work has been included in significant survey shows including Chalo! India: A New Era of Indian Art and Mori Art Museum, Japan 2008, India Moderna in Valencia Spain 2008. As an established and internationally-collected artist it is curious that

Saini Kallat is showing a set of works that have been shown in galleries abroad but will be seen for the first time in India (except for “White Heat” and a sewing machine made of bonded marble, which is a new piece).

The exhibition has video works, sculptures and a set of standing works that hover between sculpture and painting. They seem to be large portraits until a closer look reveals them to be made of rubber stamps. Each stamp has a name which is from actual lists of missing persons across the country. See it from the back and the tops of the stamps stand like a battalion of pawns from countless chess sets. “I wanted to make all those names that have been forgotten be remembered again,” she said.

Over the years since her debut in 1998 Kallat’s body of work has mutated and now

Ten years after her first solo show, Reena Saini Kallat almost seems surprised by her own evolution. “One never thought of making art that was political or critical when one was young but I wonder now whether it’s possible to not let that happen,” she said.

Past interests included

In her debut in 1998, she explored the family.

For her 2004 show Black Flute and Other Stories, Saini Kallat painted a world of myths that made pointed references to contemporary demons.

In 2006, Saini Kallat represented colonial history through the works in Rainbow of Refuse.

In another series of similar works, she recreates designs from Agra’s Taj Mahal with rubber stamps. The stamps bear names of labourers who worked on the monument. “It was a discovery for me when I found them in archives because we’ve grown up with textbooks telling us the labourers were nameless and their hands were chopped off but actually they had the right to inscribe their names on what they created,” she said.

Naming and stamping and its associations of identity and control are recurring motifs in this exhibition

Names taken from the peace petition appear on a 10-part photographic work that looks at the idea of motherland and the shifting line of control in Kashmir. They are stamped in red ink, which makes some names look like they’re the mark of something rejected by a government officer or a bleeding bruise. The video work also shows names being written in sand and then being blown away. In another set of photographs, an hourglass has in it grains of rice with names of farmers who have committed suicide written on them. The touristy frivolity of writing names on rice contrasts sharply with the grimness of the farmers’ fate.

Time Out Mumbai 

•  Chemould Prescott Road gallery exhibition Silt of Seasons images, artist bio
• Reena Kallat on Saatchi Online for biography, images, reviews
• Other dealers include Walsh Gallery Chicago, Bodhi Art Gallery Mumbai and Singapore, Nature Morte New Delhi, Sakshi Gallery Bangalore,
• More reviews NBC5 Chicago

More about Indian art, reports from India, 

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Indian contemporary art reaches a new stage of development

TV Santosh

INDIAN ART SHOW

Signs Taken For Wonders: Recent Art from India and Pakistan to January 31 2009

Indian contemporary art is reaching a new audience with large-scale museum surveys such as ‘Indian Highway’ at London’s Serpentine Gallery and ‘Chalo! India: A New Era of Indian Art’ at Japan’s Mori Art Museum. As the Aicon Gallery Signs Taken For Wonders show press release points out, this is a ‘pivotal moment’  when international curators, writers and galleries articulate how, which and whether Indian artists will become part of international art history.

Compared with art scenes in other locations, this new exposure to rigorous and objective criticism is all the more significant for contemporary Indian art which lacks its own museum and curatorial infrastructure. And unlike other emerging Asian markets such as China, there is a limited history of patronage, collecting and connoisseurship. This fascinating cusp for Indian art marks an unusual opportunity for collectors, critics and connoisseurs around the world to assess and shape a response.

Justin Ponmany Salt Friends

 

The Financial Times says that the two London exhibitions, the Serpentine Gallery’s Indian Highway and Aicon’s Signs Taken for Wonders, are the UK’s most ambitious attempts yet to distil coherence into the chaotic rush of art emerging from the Indian subcontinent.

While some of the artists are in both this show and at the Serpentine (MF Husain, Raqs Media Collective) it is worth visiting both shows which together cover many of the emerging names. At Aicon you will see some of the auction favourites  (TV Santosh and Justin Ponmany) as well as up and coming Pakistani art which is absent at the Serpentine . (Aicon Gallery for more images). Visit the Serpentine to see female artists  and video work. These were both given a smidge of approval in a generally bleak review by The Independent.

I thought Nalini Malani had something, painting flights of female figures on clear acrylic panes, where swirling smears of pigment get transformed into snaking bodies – The Independent) and  Kiran Subbaiah’s brief video, Flight Rehearsals, about an introverted young man climbing the walls of his bedroom, was tight and funny.

More positive reviews are linked below.

Artists included in the Aicon show include MF Husain, Adeela Suleman, Amjad Ali Talpur, Atul Bhalla, Bose Krishnamachari, Chintan Upadyay, GR Iranna, Justin Ponmany, Muhammed Zeeshan, Raqs Media Collective, Riyas Komu, Sajal Sarkar, Shibu Natesan, Talha Rathore, TV Santosh and Vivek Vilasini.

Related:

• More reviews: Financial Times on Serpentine and Aicon, Bloomberg, Independent, Standard
• More on Chalo India at Mori Japan, Indian artists, reports from London, events on now, museum surveys
• Devi Museum of Indian art ground-breaking first September 2008 post

What do you think about Indian contemporary art? Take part in the discourse, leave your comments below.

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Mixed reviews for Serpentine’s Indian Highway show in London – Evening Standard, Independent

N S Harsha Melting

 

INDIAN ART OVERVIEW SHOW

Indian Highway to 22 February 2009 Serpentine Gallery London

Indian Highway, a show of 25 contrasting artists from India, is billed by the Serpentine as a “snapshot of a vibrant generation of artists” and “a timely presentation of their pioneering work following the remarkable and rapid economic social and cultural developments in India in recent years”. 

The show which  incorporates architecture, art, literature and performance, will continually grow as it tours internationally to different institutions for the next four years. After London, it will be presented at Astrup Fearnley Museum, Oslo, from 4 April to 21 June 2009, where it will expand with the addition of new works as well as a section curated by Bose Krishnamachari.

M F Husain Naad Swaram Ganeshayem

The show features the following artists some of whom have already made an impact on the international art world:

Ayisha Abraham
Ravi Agarwal
Nikhil Chopra
Raqs Media Collective
Sheela Gowda
Sakshi Gupta
Shilpa Gupta
Subodh Gupta
N. S. Harsha
M. F. Husain
Jitish Kallat
Amar Kanwar
Bharti Kher
Bose Krishnamachari
Nalini Malani
Tejal Shah
Dayanita Singh
Kiran Subbaiah
Ashok Sukumaran & Shaina Anand

In an inevitable comparison with Saatchi’s show of Chinese art, Indian Highway comes out on top in the Evening Standard.

Everything that Saatchi gets wrong with his Chinese show the Serpentine gets right in its Indian one. While the Duke of York’s Baracks show is a chart of the cheesiest Chinese auction house hits, the Serpentine is a treasure trove of subtlety and surprise.

There are new history paintings from India’s 93-year-old Modernist master, a multi-screen documentary of cinematic quality about terrible violence against women, sculptures made from whistles and rotating microphones about sectarian division, and a wall drawing of super-sized technicolor bhindis.

Typical of the shrewd tack taken is the way the exhibition handles the two shooting stars of the Indian contemporary art boom, Jitish Kallat and Subodh Gupta. Kallat’s large portraits of impoverished Indians, painted in a colourful screen-printed style, with their turbans transformed into intricate urban scenes, have become must-haves for aspiring billionaire collectors. Nothing that predictable here, though. Instead we have a series of photographs of dilapidated urban India, often decorated with stencils of Hindu gods.

But Kallat’s photographs are lenticular – that kind of 3-D photo with a fuzzy surface which takes on depth and reveals hidden details as one stands at an angle to it – a kind of photography you will know from souvenir postcards of tourist attractions, cartoon characters and Princess Diana. Kallat’s process turns a photojournalistic essay into not only an alluringly colourful spectacle but also a conceptual work which plays on where tourists find beauty in India and ennobles a popular visual idiom.

Ravi Agarwal Kite

Subodh Gupta is India’s best-known contemporary artist, whose trademark works are made out of Indian cooking utensils. He won early fame with a set of shelves with neat piles of stainless steel pots and pans, organised according to minimalism’s simple geometries.

At the Serpentine, however, there is not a trace of his kitchenware. Instead, he presents an evocative installation based on the interior of an Indian county court. There are worn wooden tables, half-broken chairs, ageing electronic typewriters and bundles of creased files. I had become rather disillusioned by all the repetitive pots-and-pans pieces I’d seen by Gupta over the past few years, and I loathe the terrible spin-off photorealist paintings of the same kitchenware which have been on show in every auction preview. The new work shows what resources this artist can tap as long as he doesn’t pander to the tastes of his dimwitted market of millionaire collectors.

Alongside these shooting stars, there is also India’s most famour post-war artist MF Husain, born in 1915. He is represented here in depth by a large number of canvases including several which have been exhibited – in another imaginative act of curating – on the outside of the building.

Husain is a sure-footed master of colour and texture and his compositions are boldly drawn – a mass of charging horses, elephants, mountain ranges and dynamic figures. He has only just begun to receive the recognition he deserves, but a demanding viewer may feel his old-fashioned mythological modernism owes too much to Chagall and Kandinsky for comfort.

The show makes plain some of the shortcomings of younger contemporary artists in fast-developing economies that will have flashed through the mind of anyone familiar with contemporary Chinese art. There is a sense of these artists having quickly learned to speak the foreign language of conceptual art-ese. They get the basic grammar – take a material of symbolic significance in your home country and make a big sculpture of something else with it

Overall, the work is of sufficient interest to push these criticisms to the back of the mind. The Indians don’t make the worst mistakes of their Chinese counterparts – there is no subcontinental equivalent of Wang Guanyi’s gimmicky Maoist propaganda posters peppered with Coca-Cola logos, or Zhang Xaiogang’s cutesy soft-focus paintings of bug-eyed Cultural Revolution families. The Indian artists engage with the politics of the present, not nostalgia. The work has an impressive discipline and severity, from which flashes of fairytales suddenly burst forth.

Evening Standard review

While the Evening Standard gives legendary MF Husain and the show overall a wavering thumbs up,  the Independent has nothing much good to say starting with the show’s guiding theme. “There must be some agenda, some network of contacts, guiding the selection. A more knowing person than me could tell you what. ” And the presence of ‘Picasso of India’ s MF Husain’s work confuses matters further:

The difficulty with Husain’s art is a matter of reputation. Why should he be rated as an even remotely interesting or important artist? His crudely cartoony pictures seem to belong, not at this gallery, but across the park, on the railings of Bayswater Road. Yet in an Indian context he has been a major figure. And so a baffling cultural gap opens up, about which the show leaves us none the wiser.

There’s no such gap with the work of the younger artists. On the contrary: it looks exactly like the kind of thing you’d find at the Serpentine. Its content is often Indian, but its forms are the established idioms of international contemporary art. You’ll find all the familiar fixtures: the room-filling installation, the multi-screen video projection, the enormous colour photograph, the found-object assemblage.

If you have any doubts about the embrace of artistic globalisation, Indian Highway will settle them. You could give the show a brisk walk-through, and almost not notice where things came from.

Where Indian culture is referenced, the Independent finds the motifs and usage too obvious.

Bharti Kher makes everything – or covers everything – in bindis (adhesive forehead dot decorations). Bose Krishnamachari makes much use of tiffins (the much-used metal cylindrical lunch box). Slightly obvious ideas, true, the sort of idea you can imagine an Indian artist having rather easily – and it turns out they’re used in rather an obvious way, too.

Subodh Gupta

I found myself feeling that too often. The work is plausible enough, but nothing special. Shilpa Gupta’s In Our Times puts two old-fashioned microphones see-sawing on a stand, broadcasting the Independence speeches of Nehru (India) and Jinnah (Pakistan), delivered by a woman’s voice. Well, if I was pretending to be an Indian artist, that’s the kind of thing I’d do!

Or there’s Subodh Gupta, who’s been dubbed – well, it had to happen – “the Damien Hirst of India”, but here he appears more in the character of “the Mike Nelson of India”, with a room filled with a run-down and packed-up office. But then, same problem again: compared with Nelson’s dense and atmospheric environments, this is a very thin and under-imagined space.

I thought Nalini Malani had something, painting flights of female figures on clear acrylic panes, where swirling smears of pigment get transformed into snaking bodies. And Kiran Subbaiah’s brief video, Flight Rehearsals, about an introverted young man climbing the walls of his bedroom, was tight and funny. And Amar Kanwar’s The Lightning Testimonies used that unpromising form – the eight-screen all-around projection – and nearly made it work. But there’s nothing to bring you running.

An India-focused show looks like a good idea. But if it turns out to be a dud, then it’s a very bad idea. Anything disparaging you say about it is likely to become a disparaging generalisation about India itself. And if none of the art seems much good, you’re tempted to think that there’s a general cultural problem. The artists may seem fluent in contemporary art, but this language is clearly a Western invention. They have adopted it in an efficient but derivative way, as a badge of contemporaneity. They lack the confidence to take it over and reshape it.

Maybe. But an alternative explanation is available. It is simply that the artists in this show are stymied by the almost universal problem of not being very good artists. It can happen to artists anywhere. And then the question is, why the Serpentine didn’t find better ones?

Independent

• More images and artist details on Serpentine website
• Latest posts events on now, Indian artists, reports from London, important survey shows

Related posts:

• Indian contemporary art survey in Japan: Chalo India to March 2009

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Ravenel Art announces first Hong Kong auction of modern and contemporary art

Hino Korehiko My Elegance

 

AUCTION NEWS HONG KONG

In a move which supports the growing status of Hong Kong as Asia’s art market hub, Taiwanese auction house Ravenel Art announces its first Hong Kong auction of Contemporary and Modern Asian Art on Monday December 1, 2008.

Categories include:
In Modern Chinese Art  works by Sanyu, Zao Wou-ki and Chu Teh-chun will be offered. In the Chinese Contemporary section important works by Zhang Xiaogang, Zeng Fanzhi, Wang Guangyi, Yue Minjun and Yan Pei Ming will come under the hammer.

Ravenel Art will also include works by Korean, Japanese, S. E. Asian and Indian artists. Kim Tschang-yeul and Park Seo-Bo, two of the most important Korean artists will be represented. Paintings by Japanese artists Hino Korehiko and Hiroyuki Matsuura are sure to attract much attention. The S. E. Asian section will include works by Agus Suwage and Budi Kustarto, two of the most sought after artists at the moment. A work by Justin Ponmany, one of the leading Indian contemporary artists will also be on offer.

Zhang Xiaotao Picture of Early Spring

The auction will be held in the Four Seasons Hotel Ballroom, 8 Finance Street, Central, Hong Kong on Monday December 1.

Ravenel Art was founded in 1999 and it holds two annual Spring and Autumn auctions in Taipei and will hold Spring and Autumn auctions in Hong Kong. It specializes in Modern and Contemporary Chinese Art, Korean, Japanese, S. E. Asian and Indian Contemporary Art. The company has offices in Taipei, Hong Kong and Beijing.

Click for more Asian auction news, stories about art market globalisation,

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Singapore artist Yeo Chee Kiong’s installation wins ‘richest’ Asian art prize – Bloomberg

INSTALLATION ART PRIZE

Yeo Chee Kiong won the S$45,000 ($30,793) inaugural APB Foundation Signature Art Prize (images on website) for his installation “A Day Without a Tree,” originally shown last year at Singapore’s National Museum.

Yeo’s mixed-media work greeted visitors to the building, built in 1887, with what looked like a large puddle of white paint dripping from the walls as the columns of the four-story- high atrium melted. Yeo won the grand prize, the richest in Southeast Asia, sponsored by the Singapore Art Museum and Asia Pacific Breweries Ltd., maker of Tiger beer.

Yeo, born in 1970, said he decided to create a work based on the classical architecture because the museum was celebrating its 120th anniversary at the time of his installation.

“I tried to present something that you are not sure of,” he said in an interview at the Singapore Art Museum.

He declined to explain the work or its title.

“My position is not to tell you what it is. You have to figure that out for yourself,” he said.

Yeo was chosen from a shortlist of 12 artists from the region, including Malaysian Ahmad Fuad B. Osman, China’s Zheng Bo and India’s G.R. Iranna, who all won S$10,000 jurors’ choice awards. Mongolia’s Davaa Dorjderem won S$10,000 for the people’s choice, selected by online voters.

The award is part of a 15-year partnership between APB and the Singapore Art Museum signed a year ago. The APB Foundation has committed S$2.25 million in funding for the prize, which will be awarded every three years.

The 10 shortlisted works are on view at the Singapore Art Museum until Nov. 16.

See

• images and coverage by Bloomberg, Asia One Plush
• more on Asian art prizes
• latest reports from Singapore

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Indian art market confidence falls in latest ArtTactic survey – Indian Art News

INDIAN ART MARKET CONFIDENCE

The financial markets around the world are gradually recovering from a cardiac arrest, the banking system is being rebooted with help of government intervention and nationalisation. Most Western economies are heading for a recession. Emerging markets such as India and China have not been spared either, and the short-term economic outlook is highly uncertain.

Sentiment shift began May 2008

Now, this is the context in which the art market must be analysed. ArtTactic’s India Confidence survey in May 2008 signaled a shift in the sentiment, as respondents turned negative on the economy – 6 months after, the negative mood has now hit the Indian art market.

Confidence falls 23% May to September 2008

The recent confidence survey conducted in September 2008, showed that the overall ArtTactic Indian Art Market Confidence Indicator fell a further 23% from the last reading in May, which has resulted in a combined fall in the Indian Art Market Confidence of 34% since October 2007.

The ArtTactic Indian Art Market Indicator has been hit by 38% drop in the confidence in the economy, which is a further deterioration from the 54% decrease experienced between October 2007 and May 2008. Hence the economic component of the indicator has fallen 71% since October last year. This has to be viewed in the light of The Bombay Stock exchange (SENSEX) having lost more than 50% of its value between October 2007 and October 2008. With inflation levels at close to 12% and weaker industrial production numbers for August 2008, the Indian economy is feeling the gravity of the global crisis – a sentiment that is now starting to find its way into the heated Indian art market.

Speculation cited as cause

ArtTactic’s recent survey shows a significant fall of 36% in the Indian Contemporary Art Market Confidence Indicator, which reached its height in May 2008. The loss in confidence has been largely caused by speculation (73% of respondents saying this the biggest risk to the contemporary Indian art market), and rapidly rising prices of younger, still unproven contemporary artists, combined with a much weaker and uncertain economic climate.

Future?

So what does this mean for the future of the Indian art market? The changes are likely to take place on different levels. The most immediate; art prices and value of Indian art works will come under scrutiny, which is evident by recent results from auctions in London, New York and Hong Kong.

In the medium term there needs to be a re-assessment of the Indian art market, and questions around artistic, historic and cultural importance need to be debated, discussed and contextualised. The Indian art market desperately needs a non-market/ non-commercial reference frame for which it can questions its validity. The market needs more long-term players, particularly art collectors.

On the positive side, the Indian art market boom has laid the foundation for a healthier, second Indian art market cycle. The emergence of institutions such as the Devi Foundation are necessary, but one needs many more – as a single institution runs the risk of becoming an instrument for another speculative boom. The market needs a wide range of ‘voices’ that can maintain the checks and balances, and ensure that the value of art has a foundation outside the commercial market.

However, one should remain positive. Whilst the market will go up and down, artists and art will not cease to exist. Contrary, a difficult environment is likely to be more conducive for art production and creativity. It is in this new cycle, where the real, long term value of Indian art will be established.

• For graphs, links see Indian Art News
• latest posts on collectors, Indian art, art recession,

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Pop goes bubble for Chinese Indian artists – Businessweek

SOTHEBYS HONG KONG AUTUMN AUCTIONS

While much of Hong Kong hunkered down just hours before the arrival of a typhoon on Oct. 4, the start of Sotheby’s three-day auction of modern and contemporary Asian art was buffeted by the financial storm on Wall Street. Of the 47 works that went under the hammer, more than 40% were unsold. What’s more, earnings for Sotheby’s (BID), including the auctioneer’s commission known as the “buyer’s premium,” were a paltry $15 million, accounting for just 41% of the auction house’s estimated takings for the night. Among the biggest upsets was the unsold work by India’s hot-selling artist Subodh Gupta, Untitled, which had an estimated price of $1.55 million to $2.05 million. Another big surprise: Chinese cynical realist painter Liu Wei’s triptych, The Revolutionary Family Series, failed to find a bidder willing to meet the $1.55 million suggested minimum.

As the weather deteriorated on Sunday morning, so did events in the auction hall. Only 39 out of 110 paintings from the 20th Century Chinese Art Sale found buyers, while 71 had to be packed up and shipped back to their sellers. By the afternoon session, the usual buzz at Hong Kong’s contemporary Chinese art auctions was sorely absent. At one point during the sale, the auctioneer mistook a woman covering her mouth to stifle a yawn for her wishing to bid, prompting a valiant attempt to inject some levity into the proceedings as he asked if “anyone else is yawning in the room.”

Yawns gave way to disbelief a little later when two works by white-hot Chinese artist Zhang Xiaogang went unsold. That’s a huge reversal for the Beijing-based artist, whose paintings have routinely fetched millions of dollars, well in excess of auction estimates. (His painting Bloodline: Big Family No. 1 was one of the few top lots that sold on Saturday, though the $2.97 million price was below the expected maximum.) Yue Minjun and Zeng Fanzhi, two others among the hottest-selling Chinese contemporary artists, did manage to sell, although well within the estimates.

Wall Street Fallout
You connect the dots: Wall Street goes into meltdown, and Sotheby’s auction bombs in Hong Kong. Kevin Ching, Sotheby’s CEO for Asia, tries to be optimistic about whether the two are connected. “I hope there is no immediate direct correlation between the financial market and the art market,” he says, pointing to the widely successful auction of enfant terrible Damien Hirst’s works in London within days of the collapse of Lehman Brothers. The problem with some of the Hong Kong auction, he adds, stems from overly ambitious owners trying for unreasonably high prices. “When we have [sellers] who want aggressive estimates over and above what [the] market can accept, they would have to occasionally accept the consequences, and I think that’s what happened here [Saturday] night,” Ching explains.

Still, others in Asia’s art business are certain the fallout from Wall Street is already hurting Chinese and Indian markets. In both countries, newly wealthy investment bankers and hedge fund managers helped inflate bubbles in works by local artists. For instance, in the last four years a booming Indian economy and buoyant stock market encouraged many private banks to offer fee-based services to assist clients in building portfolios of artworks sourced from galleries, auctions, and even direct sales. Fund managers say that investment bankers with their hefty bonuses helped inflate art prices by 30% to 60% above their real value, according to a gallery owner in Mumbai.

Bright Spots
Now with Wall Street in turmoil, most of the bankers who were regulars at art shows and auctions have moved out, says avid art collector Harsh Goenka, chairman of India’s diversified RPG Enterprises, which has interests in tires, power, and retail. He claims that in the last few years, around 60% to 70% of art sold in auctions and shows in India went to the new breed of investor rather than art connoisseurs. “They looked at art as a brand and made money by trading in it,” says Goenka. In the past few months, he says, painters and art dealers have been calling him up to offer their unsold works at a 30% to 40% discount.

The picture isn’t all grim, though. The mood was positively ebullient at Sotheby’s Hong Kong on Oct. 6 as buyers crammed the room for the auction of Southeast Asian contemporary paintings. Sotheby’s employees manned the phones to handle enthusiastic overseas bidding. For instance, Indonesian painter I Nyoman Masriadi had already set a personal record on the first day of the Sotheby’s auction when his huge canvas featuring Batman and Superman sitting on adjacent toilets sold for $620,000. He then surpassed that with a painting of boxers that seems part Botero, part Léger; it fetched a high $833,000. A bit later, during furious bidding for yet another Masriadi, the auctioneer exclaimed “This is really, really fun.” The room broke into applause when the work finally sold for a very respectable $307,000.

The reason for this sea change in sentiment? The prices were far more affordable than the works from China and India on sale during the weekend, and collectors seem to have finally cottoned onto the notion that Indonesian, Vietnamese, and Filipino artists represent opportunities for collectors to own great art. One work by up-and-coming Filipino painter Geraldine Javier sold for $32,000, more than three times the high estimate. An intimate portrait of a woman and child by Vietnamese painter Mai Trung Thu also sold for triple the estimate, fetching $23,000.

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