As the global economy teeters, one market is still reaching stratospheric highs: Chinese art.
A Hong Kong auction of fine Chinese paintings earlier this month raised $94.8 million, three times pre-sale estimates. In fact, China is now the world's biggest art market, according to the art information agency Artprice.
Yet all is not what it seems in the murky world of Chinese art auctions, including a painting that sold last year for more than $11 million, but appears not to be what was advertised.
The young girl in the painting stands naked against a burgundy backdrop, one leg bent, an elbow crooked behind her back. Her eyes downcast, she looks shy and uncomfortable.
This artwork was put up to auction by Beijing Jiuge Auctions, as a portrait by the famous artist Xu Beihong of his wife, Jiang Biwei, and it sold for $11.4 million. A note from his son, Xu Boyang, on the back of the painting attests that it was by his father, although the artist died in 1953.
But Wang Yanqing, a 66-year-old painter in Inner Mongolia, tells another story.
"It's totally laughable," he says. "That picture doesn't look anything like Xu Beihong's wife." He says the picture was one of several painted by art students in his class at the prestigious Central Academy of Fine Arts (CAFA) in 1983, 30 years after the artist's death. The model was a peasant farmer. Wang was one of those students who painted her, and his memory is crystal clear.
"At that time, it was very difficult to find nude models, so we painted the same ones over and over, and it was boring," he remembers. "Suddenly this new model came — a young girl from the south who'd never modeled before, and everyone was very excited. We all wanted to draw her, so almost 20 of us crowded into the same room. It was one of my most successful pictures. I still have it in my studio."
Indeed, the subject in his painting is identical to the one that sold for $11 million, except for the angle. Four other classmates have produced pictures of the same girl, in the same pose, with the same backdrop. As Wang points out, it's an impossible coincidence.
"The person we painted had a 1980s hairstyle," he says, and he also notes the different styles of painting. "Xu Beihong studied in France, so he painted in a Western European style. But we were painting under the Soviet influence in a Russian style." He and his classmates published an open letter exposing the picture as a fake to stop it from circulating on the market.
No Standards For Auctions
"At this moment, in practice, there are no standards" in the Chinese art market, says Gong Jisui, a former Sotheby's expert who's now a visiting scholar in Beijing at CAFA.
"It's really, really bad. For the classical Chinese paintings, most of the pieces are disputable," Gong says. "Also, for modern Chinese paintings, there is a serious problem with authenticity issues."
It's not just the pieces that might be fake. At Chinese auctions, the bids are sometimes fake too. In some cases, the seller, or even the artist, may bid on their own pieces to push the prices up.
Sometimes auctions are used to pass bribes. For example, the buyer overbids for something mediocre — or even fake — and so passes money legally to the seller. Many auction houses turn a blind eye, since the higher the price, the higher their commission.
Paul Dong of Forever Auctions, the trademark licensee for Christie's in China, describes how the approach is made. "There are clients at certain times who come to us and say, 'Don't look at the quality of the property. I can assure you someone will buy it at a very high price, you'll earn your money.' We absolutely reject such offers."
