A Chinese face or two in the crowd at the world’s auction houses often means one thing: The gavel will fall on a price far beyond the seller’s wildest dreams.
Fierce bidding by Chinese buyers for a vase at a small London auctioneer in November, for example, drove the price up nearly 40 times beyond its estimate.
It was the highest price ever paid for a Chinese artwork sold at auction and equivalent to a huge lottery win for the sellers, who found the 18th Century Qianlong Emperor-era piece while clearing out a house after a relative died.
The fragile porcelain vase reportedly sat perched precariously on top of a bookcase in a suburban London home for decades and had been insured by the owner for the princely sum of €954.
Another 18th Century Chinese vase sold for almost €24 million at a Sotheby’s Hong Kong auction in October, five times more than the top estimate for the piece.
And last year was a record for rival auctioneers Christie’s.
The firm generated €3.6 billion in global sales, a 53 per cent increase and the industry’s highest ever sales total. Hong Kong sales doubled to $721.9 million.
Christie’s most expensive Chinese lot in 2010 was a pair of crane statues, with the four lifesize wading birds waddling off to a Hong Kong real estate tycoon for €12.1 million in December.
The auction house’s Asia president Francois Curiel says Chinese collectors who want to repatriate works of art are now a huge factor in the global market. The firm sold €643.9 million in Asian art globally.
“What we are seeing is that Chinese collectors are scanning the catalogues and the fairs worldwide,” he remarked. “They are buying to bring back to China their treasures and great Chinese works of art.
“It will often be Chinese versus Chinese versus Chinese, with all the European and American collectors being left behind, sometimes not even being able to raise their hand at the auction.”
Mr Curiel predicts that the market for Chinese artworks will be the same as that for European and North American works by 2015.
“I believe that we are just seeing the beginning here of the development of the art market,” he says. “There are more and more rich people.
“Art has become a new way of putting money away.” The main driver behind the new arrivals in the market is simple: hundreds of thousands of Chinese people now have serious money to spend.
“China probably now has the largest number of billionaires anywhere in the world,” Rupert Hoogewerf, founder and compiler of the list, said. Mr Curiel said: “Mainland Chinese are our main buyers, not only in Hong Kong where they are about 80 percent of our buyers, but also in New York, in London, in Geneva, in Paris.”
They are absolutely everywhere now when there is a piece of fine Asian contemporary art, Chinese works of art, Chinese calligraphy and even Western art, Mr Curiel added.”