Displaying items by tag: China

He may not be a household name in Western countries, but over the past few years the Chinese painter Qi Baishi (齐白石, 1864-1957) has quietly emerged as one of the world’s top-selling artists on the strength of his popularity among cashed-up mainland Chinese collectors. As the global financial crisis hit international auction houses in 2009, emergent Chinese collectors pumped millions into works by Qi at domestic Chinese auctions, making his ascent appear even more dramatic, and following two years of strong sales, last year Qi Baishi trailed only Pablo Picasso in ArtPrice’s annual artist sales ranking with US$70 million in sales. This saw Qi, for the first time, surpass list stalwart Andy Warhol, an achievement that was not lost on the international art press.

Now, in the wake of this weekend’s China Guardian spring auctions in Beijing, held this past weekend, Qi is back in the news. On Sunday, Qi’s 1946 ink painting “A Long Life, a Peaceful World” sold for a jaw-dropping 425.5 million yuan (US$65 million), in the process setting a new record for a Chinese painting. The 100 x 266 cm (3 x 8.5 feet) ink wash, originally created as a gift to then-Chinese leader Chiang Kai-shek, depicts a falcon on a pine branch, flanked on either side by Qi’s masterful calligraphy. The sale of this work, along with another of Qi’s paintings that sold for 92 million yuan (US$14 million) this weekend, helped the China Guardian spring auctions pull in a grand total of 1 billion yuan ($649 million) so far.

As Artinfo points out, on the strength of its ongoing spring auctions, China Guardian looks to reassert dominance in the domestic Chinese auction house over its rival Poly, which edged the former out last year with US$1.5 billion in sales last year. With the priority these auction houses place on traditional Chinese artists (though they are increasingly championing contemporary Chinese artists as well), Artinfo notes that China Guardian and Poly are hoping to tap an increasingly important market:

Over the last couple of years, as Chinese collectors have increasingly made their presence felt in auction rooms around the world, the value of works by modern masters like Qi Baishi, Xu Beihong, Zhang Daqian, and Fu Baoshi have skyrocketed. Last year these modern artists, whose work is in the traditional Chinese style, took out four of the top ten spots in Artprice’s global rankings by auction revenue.

The previous record for a Chinese painting at auction was set last year at Beijing’s Hanhai auction house, when Xu Beihong’s “Ba People Fetching Water” (1937) sold for for RMB 171 million ($25.8 million). Qi Baishi’s work now takes third place overall in the record rankings of Chinese works of art at auction. First place is held by the Qianlong vase that sold at Bainbridges in the United Kingdom for $85.9 million last November, with second place going to a calligraphy by Song Dynasty master Huang Tingjian that sold at Poly Auctions in Beijing last June for RMB 436.8 million ($64 million).

Art and politics are entangled in China. Two recent events in Beijing show just how much: the reopening of the National Museum and the detention of the outspoken artist Ai Weiwei.

The renovated museum's inaugural displays avoid the less palatable aspects of history under the Communist Party, including the disastrous famines of the Great Leap Forward that cost millions of lives in the 1950s and '60s. There's only a minute reference to the violent and destructive Cultural Revolution of the '60s and '70s, and none at all to the bloody 1989 pro-democracy protests of Tiananmen Square, where the museum stands.

Such omissions are no surprise. Artists in China have long been aware of these and other no-go subjects. They know that if they want to show their work in state-run museums, they must conform to an unspoken "no politics, no sex and no violence" rule.

In the early 1990s, many artists tried to get around this rule by showing their work at their studios and private galleries. Even so, exhibitions were sometimes closed by authorities and artists rounded up. Performance artists in Beijing's East Village were especially vulnerable in 1994. One of the most celebrated, Ma Liuming, was arrested after security forces broke up a performance.

Recently, there has been a relaxation of sorts. During the past five years, gallery districts have flourished in cities across the country, a collector class has grown in line with the boom in the economy and even state-run museums have let down their guard to show more contemporary works.

As the Chinese art world expanded, the government applied more stringent conditions for the media in the lead-up to the Beijing 2008 Olympics. Ai Weiwei seemed like an exception to the rule, since his comments to the Western media were often critical of the government.

Long used to traveling in and out of the country as his international reputation and fame grew, Ai Weiwei was taken into custody at Beijing Airport on April 3 as he tried to board a plane to Hong Kong. Now held in parts unknown and being investigated for unspecified "economic crimes," Ai Weiwei joins a list of other artists, lawyers and activists detained during the past two months.

Many see the crackdown as evidence of government nervousness over calls for a Chinese "Jasmine revolution" after regime-changing protests in North Africa and the Middle East. Ai Weiwei, like other critics, had made such comparisons.

At the elaborately renovated National Museum of China in Tiananmen Square, visitors interested in the recent history of the world’s fastest rising power can gaze at the cowboy hat that Deng Xiaoping once wore when he visited the United States, or admire the bullhorn that President Hu Jintao used to exhort people to overcome hardship after the Sichuan earthquake in 2008.

But if their interests run to the Cultural Revolution that tore the country apart from 1966 to 1976 and resulted in millions of deaths, they will have to search a back corner of the two-million-square-foot museum, which will complete its opening this month, for a single photograph and three lines of text that are the only reference to that era.

China spent more than a decade and nearly $400 million to remake the National Museum into a leading showcase of history and culture, a monument to its rising power no less grand — it is designed to be the world’s largest museum under one roof — and more enduring than the Olympic Games it hosted in 2008.

But one tradition has remained firmly in place: China will not confront its own history. The museum is less the product of extensive research, discovery or creativity than the most prominent symbol of the Communist Party’s efforts to control the narrative of history and suppress alternative points of view, even those that exist within the governing elite. It is also an example of how China finds it difficult to create cultural institutions that prove equal to its economic achievements.

Interviews with participants describe a tortured reconstruction that dragged on years longer than envisioned, with plans constantly revised to accommodate political twists and turns, many decided personally by top party leaders.

Officials rejected proposals for a permanent historical exhibition that would have discussed the disasters of early Communist rule — especially the Great Leap Forward, a political campaign and resulting famine that killed more than 20 million. Some organizers also wanted a candid appraisal of the Cultural Revolution, a decade-long attack on traditional culture and learning, but that effort was squashed.

China overtook Britain as the world's second largest art and antiques market last year, a new report showed, and British art officials voiced concern that an EU levy planned in 2012 would further undermine its position.

"The Global Art Market in 2010: Crisis and Recovery" underlined what auction houses and consigners had seen throughout last year -- a sharp rise in the number of wealthy Chinese buyers, and, with them, prices.

The report, commissioned by the European Fine Art Foundation, estimated the value of the global art and antiques market in 2010 at 43 billion euros ($60 billion), up 52 percent from 2009 when values slumped as a result of the financial crisis.

"The period from 2008 through 2010 has been one of crisis and recovery for the market for art and antiques," said the report, released on Monday.

"Luxury spending contracted sharply in many countries during 2009, however 2010 brought the first signs of economic recovery with a rebound in consumer confidence and with Chinese consumers driving growth in many luxury sectors."

The report highlighted concerns in Britain that an EU art tax due to be imposed in 2012 could further damage the country's ability to cope with increasing competition from abroad.