The Great China Sale

By Simon Elegant / Beijing

Zhang Haoming looks like a million dollars. Or, more precisely, half a million, the amount he spent on a recent Saturday afternoon as he strolled around Beijing's funky 798 district, a series of crumbling redbrick factories that house the Chinese capital's largest concentration of art galleries. Appearing at an opening for the painter Yang Shaobin, the 44-year-old millionaire businessman stands out from the crowd of black-clad, ponytailed dealers, critics and artists, more John Travolta than Jasper Johns. His black hair is permed into loose curls that flounce slightly as he walks, his torso covered by a tight, long-sleeved silk shirt decorated with swirling white, brown and black shapes, a large medallion bearing a golden crown clasped around his neck.

As he moves from one gallery to the next, checking on works he has already booked and buying new ones, Zhang is treated like royalty. "That's mine," he says at a photo gallery, pointing to a picture of a man's back that has been painted with a classical Chinese landscape, then to one in which raw meat has been arranged into the shape of Chinese characters. "And that, and that."

Zhang is one of a new breed of Chinese collectors who are helping to turbocharge the contemporary-art scene in China from within. But his competition is not just local. Contemporary Chinese art is currently one of the hottest genres anywhere. In the past 18 months Sotheby's has created a stand-alone modern-Chinese-art division, and Christie's showcases the art alongside such modern masters as Andy Warhol and Willem de Kooning. And at a Christie's auction last week in New York City, pieces by Chinese painters Li Songsong and Yan Lei set record prices, while Zhang Xiaogang's A Big Family Series No. 16 went for $1.36 million, surpassing its highest estimate. The Warhol Mao, of course, dwarfed all those sales, going for $17.4 million, suggesting that there's plenty of life in Western art yet. (And that Mao is one popular guy.)

If the incestuous, trend-conscious world of international art collectors and the hot money of the roughly 500 new millionaires that China's boom has thrown up come together, it could push prices for Chinese art to even more dizzying levels. "You are already seeing works that sold for a few thousand dollars being bought for $50,000, $60,000, $70,000," says artist and Beijing gallery director Zhao Gang. "And right now there's no end in sight." He cites the case of Zeng Fanzhi, until recently a relatively unknown artist. "Two years ago, I was selling his work for $10,000 for a large painting. The other day someone offered $200,000, and he refused it as too low!"

The purchase of a large painting by Zhang Xiaogang at an Oct. 15 London auction by British collector Charles Saatchi suggests there's every reason to believe that the tide of interest from overseas will continue to rise. Saatchi paid about $1.5 million for one of the artist's Bloodline series. Still, New York City--based collector Larry Warsh believes he got a good deal. "Saatchi is coming in late, but he's important because people follow him," says Warsh, publisher of the magazine Museums and an enthusiastic advocate of contemporary Chinese art. "It will soon prove to be a bargain."

There may not yet be any discerning Chinese collectors in the model of the influential Saatchi. But that's unlikely to affect the demand for modern Chinese art, since many of the newly minted millionaires simply don't have anywhere else to put their cash. "It's what I call the panic of new money," says Zhao, 45, who manages the venerable Courtyard Gallery. "The government is killing the property market, the stock market has been up and down like a bouncing ball, and people don't trust it. They can only buy so many Mercedes. They have to put their money somewhere, and right now that means contemporary art."

Such speculative interest could evaporate overnight if the market cools, of course. But that's where the non-Chinese buyers come in. The international contemporary-art market is highly cyclical--many would say current prices are at all-time highs--but there remains a core group of wealthy art collectors who will be comparatively unaffected by external conditions. It's the buyers from that group who are now turning their attention to China, argues banker and avid collector Carl Kostyal. "About 10 to 20 collectors are at the leading edge of contemporary art globally," says Kostyal. "They are already buying in China and have been for a year or so. Then there is another group of 200 to 300 for whom this buying is bringing China into their sights." Kostyal, who recently flew into Beijing for two days of gallery tours and visits to artists' studios, believes that a second--and larger--group will soon begin to buy, further bolstering the market.

Skyrocketing prices have left galleries and dealers scrambling to keep up with the demand. Sotheby's held its first sale of purely Chinese contemporary art in New York City only last March. A dozen or so foreign galleries from New York, London and Hong Kong have opened branches in Beijing and Shanghai in the past 18 months. Meanwhile, scores of local galleries have sprung up.

Inevitably, the flood of money has left some members of the art world in China unhappy. "Modern art in China has become a monster," says respected collector Guan Yi. "People's attention is no longer focused on the art itself but [on] what kind of return they will get on their investment, like the stock market."

The contrast between such sentiments and the attitudes of the current crop of leading artists, like Zhang Xiaogang, Zhu Wei and Fang Lijun, couldn't be starker. Mostly now in their 40s, many of the artists suffered through the tail end of the Cultural Revolution. The cultural flowering that followed in the '80s was another casualty of the Tiananmen Square massacre in 1989. Many artists left the country. Now back, they're thrilled at being rewarded instead of hounded for expressing their feelings in their work. Fundamental issues like politics, ideology and spirituality remain important themes. Images of Mao Zedong, the Red Guards and other icons of the recent past are central to the works that have brought many of them fame.

For the young artists just breaking into the scene, such images have little resonance, except as tools to raise their prices, says gallery director Zhao. "To them it's like being in manufacturing--they are cranking out a commodity," he says with a sigh. "But then, at prices like these, you can hardly blame them."