During the mid-2000s, Chinese contemporary art rose to world attention, with political pop and cynical realist works by artists like Yue Minjun and Zhang Xiaogang regularly breaking records at auction. In 2008 Zeng Fanzhi's Mask Series 1996 No. 6 sold for $9.66 million at Christie's, setting a world record for a contemporary Chinese artist, and the Guggenheim Museum in New York ran a major retrospective of Cai Guo-Qiang's gunpowder works. But when the global economy shut down, China's art market faltered along with so many others. Now it's back, this time powered in large part by Chinese buyers. And unlike their Western counterparts, they are eschewing contemporary works in favor of 20th-century Chinese masters and classical ink paintings.
Last year the most expensive Chinese painting sold at auction was a rare scroll by 16th-century Ming-dynasty artist Wu Bin. Bought by Liu Yiqian, a private collector from Shanghai who paid $24.8 million, Eighteen Arhats was the seventh-most-expensive painting sold worldwide in 2009—right behind Picasso, Matisse, and Rembrandt. That was more than double the previous record price for a classical Chinese painting, a Ming-dynasty masterpiece by Qiu Ying that was sold in 2008 before the financial crisis hit. By comparison, the top price achieved last year by a contemporary Chinese artist, Chen Yifei (1946–2005), was a mere $5.3 million—and his romantic-realistic painting of melancholic women in traditional dress couldn't be further from the political pop style embraced a few years ago by collectors. "Classical Chinese art has seen a massive surge in interest, due in part to the increase of wealthy Chinese collectors, and also to the perception that classical art is a safer bet than the more fashionable contemporary art," says Rupert Hoogewerf, founder of the Hurun Report, which publishes various surveys including the Hurun Art List of contemporary artists. Read the whole story in
Newsweek.
