Art Market Monitor

Global Coverage ~ Unique Analysis

  • AMMpro
  • AMM Fantasy Collecting Game
  • Podcast
  • Contact Us

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

September 2, 2020 by Angelica Villa

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

Americans Still Buying Top Chinese Contemporary Lots

April 4, 2011 by Marion Maneker

Zhang Xiaogang’s “Forever Lasting Love” set a record price for a work of Chinese Contemporary art at auction yesterday during the Ullens sale at Sotheby’s in Hong Kong. Chinese Contemporary art was once sold in New York because the buyers were in the West, not China. Then the auction houses moved their sales to Hong Kong in recognition that the future of Asian art market would be, not surprisingly, in Asia.

Bloomberg spoke to a few of the potential buyers on the ground in Hong Kong:

“Prices of Chinese artists will continue to rise,” Gu Zhenqing, 47, who has been buying contemporary works for 10 years, said in an interview at the sale. “I’m confident that the price of a work by a Chinese artist will exceed the 100 million yuan ($15.3 million) mark this year. That could be Zhang Xiaogang, Zeng Fanzhi or someone else.” […]

“Art prices are still within a rational range,” said Ge Yaping, 42, a Chinese bidder from Nanjing, who bought a piece by Zhang Xiaogang. “Prices will continue to trend upward because of China’s economy.”

Today’s strong sales not only of Chinese artists but also Japanese, Indonesian, Vietnamese and artists from the Philippines would seem to have firmly established the idea of pan-Asian collecting. However, Cathy Yan reports on the WSJ’s SceneAsia blog that the buyer of the second most-valuable Zhang painting was not from the region:

[W]orks by Zhang Xiaogang were the stars of the sale. “Forever Lasting Love” — a three-panel painting from 1988 that is one of the artist’s earliest works — was part of the seminal 1989 exhibit in Beijing’s National Art Gallery, “China/Avante-Garde.” And the second top-selling lot of the sale, fetching HK$23 million from a private American collector, was a painting from Mr. Zhang’s popular Bloodline Series

China Buying Spree, Record Painting Boost $54.9 Million Sale (Bloomberg)

Ullens Collection Sets a Record (SceneAsia/Wall Street Journal)

LiveArt

Want to get Art Market Monitor‘s posts sent to you in our email? Sign up below by clicking on the Subscribe button.

  • About Us/ Contact
  • Podcast
  • AMMpro
  • Newsletter
  • FAQ

twitterfacebooksoundcloud
Privacy Policy
Terms & Conditions
California Privacy Rights
Do Not Sell My Personal Information
Advertise on Art Market Monitor
 

Loading Comments...