Zwirner at Indian Art Fair: James Green did a brief interview on Zwirner Gallery’s participation in the Indian Art Fair with India’s First Post:

• “[W]e have been engaging with South Asia a lot more. We have been connecting with Asian collectors through our galleries in London, New York and, as of January 2018, Hong Kong — so it is a natural progression to come to India and exhibit at the fair.”
• “We are presenting work by eight artists who reflect the broad range of our programme. We are delighted that Yayoi Kusama, who already has a following in India, made brand new works for the fair. Alongside Kusama, we have groups of works by Sherrie Levine, Thomas Ruff and James Welling — artists who are key to our gallery but are perhaps less well known in India, who we would like to introduce to an Asian audience. We have also brought works by Oscar Murillo, Alice Neel, Chris Ofili and Luc Tuymans.” …

A Smaller Art Stage Singapore Might Have Been a Better Event for Some Galleries: Here’s an interesting data point from the troubled Art Stage Singapore which has been branching out to Jakarta. Lorenzo Rudolf has been vocal in his observation that Southeast Asia is seeing booming art production and market infrastructure everywhere but Singapore: ““The Philippines, Indonesia, Thailand are booming, only Singapore is stagnant.”

Meanwhile, The Jakarta Post observes that Art Stage Singapore had 84 exhibitors last month, the smallest number since its opening in 2011. That’s down from 131 galleries in 2017 and 170 the year before. More to the point, at least judging from Indonesian artists and galleries, sales were up substantially. Here’s what The Jakarta Post got from Jasdeep Sandu of Gajah Gallery: “We believe the smaller number of galleries has helped and perhaps indicates the size for the arts stage to move ahead.” With government support for the fair, that may prove possible. …

Remember the Chinese Buyer Who Reneged on the $70m Qianlong Vase Find?: Ok. This is going back a ways and it turns out there were some reports about this five years ago. But we realized when reading Spears’s story on Rupert Boswall’s art dispute practice that we’d never followed up on the rambunctious sale of a Qianlong vase at a regional UK auction house that soared to $70m (and then the winning bidder defaulted on his or her bid):

• “Boswall did the Bainbridges buyer’s case, which is the most famous example of this phenomenon. Tony Johnson and his mother Gene had sold an 18th-century Chinese vase through provincial auction house Bainbridges Auctions in 2010, but the winning bidder refused to pay the 20 per cent buyer’s premium. ‘Six Chinese bidders bid up to £25 million, two take it up to £43 million, but the highest bidder, to whom it was knocked down, has bid through a BVI company, which we couldn’t enforce against, and therefore he was able to renege on the deal,’ Boswall recalls. The vase was ultimately sold separately to another Chinese buyer for £25 million.” …

Seoul Auctions Opens Hong Kong Location: The new location called SA+ will be in the H Queens building along with other international galleries:

• “International demand for Korean art has surged since 2014,” said marketing director Chey Youn-seok. “Accordingly, our goal for the next decade is to bring Korean art, which is still in the peripheral areas of international art, to the center. The launch of SA+ will be part of that effort.” …

The Tate’s Black Power Show Opens at Crystal Bridges: Bloomberg covers the reception of 164 works by 60 artists in a state where the idea of culture and race is lived every day, as the story puts it:

• “What we say a lot [here] is that our mission is to try to welcome all,” says Lauren Haynes, a curator at Crystal Bridges. “There may be people who decide not to come because they feel like, ‘Black Power? Oh, this isn’t for me.’  But it is for them. This moment in our nation’s history didn’t just belong to one group of people. It was happening to all of us.” …

“This is not a society portrait. It is symbolic of renewing hope.”: Ben Okri explains the signficance of the rediscovery of Ben Enwonwu’s portrait “Tutu,” which will be sold in London at Bonhams:

• “The discovery of the painting could also furnish the occasion to ask fundamental questions about the African artistic contribution to the story of modern art. For apart from the seminal role that traditional African sculpture played in the birth of modernism in the early years of the 20th century, the presence of modern African artists has been largely absent from the story of art.”