Art Market Monitor

Global Coverage ~ Unique Analysis

Zhang Xiaogang and Key Chinese Contemporary Artists from Storied Johnson Chang Collection Come to Auction

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Zhang Xiaogang, Amnesia and Memory 2008 No.1. Courtesy Sotheby’s.

As summer ends and the new global market calendar takes shape, auction houses are gearing up for the fall sales. Sotheby’s has secured a selection of works by Chinese Contemporary artists from the holdings of Hong Kong-based collector and dealer Johnson Chang. Works by Zhang Xiaogang, Zeng Fanzhi, Liu Wei, Fang Lijun, and Yu Youhan will be sold in the private collection sale segment titled ‘The First Avant-Garde” during the house’s Asia-based contemporary art day and evening sales at the Hong Kong Convention Center on October 6 to 7.

Chang, who is known as the founder of the Hanart TZ Gallery in 1983 amassed his collection in the 1980s to 1990s as artists such as Zeng Fanzhi, Zhang Xiaogang and Liu Wei featured in his holdings entered the beginning of their careers. Chang’s influence in the contemporary art scene in Asia was led by pioneering curatorial projects including the watershed showcase The Stars: 10 Years (1989), New Art from China: Post-1989 (1993), as well as the 1994 Chinese Contemporary art exhibition at São Paulo’s Art Biennial (1994), and the 1995 Chinese Exhibition at the Venice Biennale. Chang also co-curated Paris-Pekin, an exhibition of select works from the private collection of Contemporary Chinese art patron, Guy Ullens. In 2011, Sotheby’s sold Ullens’ private collection for more than HKD 132 million ($16 million.) It was a crucial milestone in the Asian art market as the highest grossing single-owner sale of Contemporary Chinese Art at the time.Continue Reading

How to Build a Chinese Art Museum

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When Enid Tsui asked Valerie Wang Conghui, the advisor working with Zeng Baobao, to build an art collection—already 200 pieces strong—for Fantasia Holding’s museum in Xinjin, China, why a Hong Kong-listed resort operator and property developer would build a museum in Sichuan province, the answer was simple: “Having a museum adds value to a company, both in terms of branding and by spreading good taste and design ideas…”

In the four years since Zeng decided to fill the museum, the two have been on journey of discovery through all of the world’s art fairs and auctions.

“Initially, there was no clear strategy about the museum’s content and we bought what we liked: fun works such as Li Jin’s contemporary ink paintings. But as we spent more time looking, a theme for the museum developed naturally: modern and contemporary art that conveys traditional Chinese aesthetics.”

But to be a museum, Zhi needs art worthy of being loaned out to other institutions. So the pair invested in works by Zao Wou-ki and Zeng Fanzhi. Whether those two artists were sought because of their art historical importance or their price points is something Tsui leaves unclear in the story.

Chinese art museum finally takes shape with big-ticket items bought on a billionaire’s budget  (South China Morning Post)

Zeng Fanzhi Cultivates His Collector Base, Especially One

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Zeng Fanzhi is very influential artist. He’s also an important tastemaker in China with a powerful posse of collectors. (In this Artelligence podcast, Helly Nahmad tells an relevant story about the Giorgio Morandi market worth listening to.) But how did he get such influence? The New York Times’s Jane Perlez spent some time with him to write this revealing profile:

How has he managed to stay at the top? “You might say I am very cunning,” he said, a small cheeky smile across his broad, smooth face. “I only sell my paintings to those who really like them. Then those people will help me promote my works.”

It is this approach of cultivating collectors who cherish his art, combined with indisputable painting skills, that has propelled him to the fore, said Philip Tinari, the director of the Ullens Center.

“China needs a great artist, and the way he has gone about it is very intelligent,” Mr. Tinari said. “He understands the milieu his works circulate in, the actual collectors’ homes, cultural institutions and galleries. He invites these key people to be part of his success, and as he achieves higher degrees of validation it’s something everyone feels good about.”

That cultivation isn’t confined to Chinese collectors. As with so much Contemporary art, one important tastemaker who is heavily invested in the Zeng market is Christie’s owner Francois Pinault:Continue Reading

The Origins of Zeng Fanzhi

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Zeng Fanzhi, Artist Series, Lucian Freud

The Financial Times profiles Zeng Fanzhi ahead of Sotheby’s Hong Kong sales featuring his Last Supper:

Although all he wanted to do was stay home and paint, Zeng was assigned by the government to work at a fledgling advertising agency when he graduated in 1991. It would turn out to be the dawn of the advertising industry in post-revolution China. “When I started there the only advertising that could be displayed was political slogans but that soon changed,” Zeng says. “I managed to get a big ad contract for the agency and so then I didn’t have to go to the office for a year. I did some of my best work in that period.”

Much of his formal schooling was meant to produce social-realist works in the traditional Soviet style but he also developed an appreciation for German expressionists and, in his brief foray into advertising, he even read books by ad guru David Ogilvy on how to sell beer and shirts. He produced his first major works, including the haunting and grotesque “meat” and “hospital” series, in which his subjects already sported the oversized hands that would become a signature feature of his work.

Zeng was able to quit his job altogether and move to culturally rich Beijing at the start of 1993, after selling his first paintings to Johnson Chang, the renowned Hong Kong collector. Partly on the advice of the influential art critic Li Xianting, Chang paid $2,000 each for four large canvases, an enormous sum of money at that time in China.

Zeng says Chang still has the four pieces, which must be worth multiple millions of dollars today. “At that time those two [Chang and Li] were the most important people in the Chinese art world and they really gave me my start,” says Zeng. “It wasn’t just money, they also gave me confidence.”

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