And as we continue to adapt to life after the dawn of COVID-19, Asia has emerged as a powerful engine in the art market’s recovery.
In collaboration with Artnet, Morgan Stanley will explore the evolution—and the future—of the art market in Asia.
Dramatic as it sounds, nothing like the global art market we know today existed until 2008–2010, when China emerged as a major regional power.
and the U.K., with France and Germany operating on the periphery.2 By 2006, however, China quickly had overtaken Germany and France in total annual fine-art auction sales.
too in 2010, becoming the highest-selling region in the world for the first time but not the last.
saw declines, China’s fine-art sales at auction effectively held steady.4 The nation’s economy recovered alongside daily life, allowing China to reclaim the title as the top-selling global fine-art auction market in 2020, a position it hadn’t held since 2016.
In the auction sector, Sotheby’s held its first sale in Hong Kong in 1973, and Christie’s followed suit in 1986—both well before Hong Kong and China more broadly emerged as notable players in art auctions.8 The region’s initial surge came from Hong Kong.
In 2019, Patti Wong said that when she was appointed chairman of Sotheby’s Hong Kong in 2004, the city was still viewed as a “regional hub” whose business relied on “Chinese collectors buying Chinese things.”13 Indeed, from 1991 to 2004, a grand total of just 158 works by Western fine artists sold at auction in the city, with a combined value of roughly $12.3 million, according to the Artnet Price Database.
Just as important, this same demographic is increasingly pushing living Western artists of lesser stature in the U.S.
In a sense, this development completes China and East Asia’s art-market evolution, from nonparticipants in the global trade, to students of Western trends, to tastemakers in their own right.
Asia’s growing impact can be seen even beyond auction-house walls, in every sector of the art industry.
saw auction sales plummet around 35 percent each, China recorded only a 0.1 percent dip from 2019 to 2020.25 Analysts attribute this trend in part to China’s speedier response to the pandemic, which enabled it to resume in-person sales more quickly than other countries, but also to an uptick in spending power.26 The combination has propelled Hong Kong’s auction market far past pre-pandemic levels.
South Korea: South Korea’s auction market is a fraction of the size of China’s.
Taiwan: In the 1990s, Taiwan’s art market was the largest in Asia.30 Times have changed: Today, its auction sales are roughly equivalent to a rounding error in China’s figures.
That momentum has continued into 2021: Buyers from Asia accounted for $1.04 billion in spending, almost a third of the value of Christie’s sales worldwide in the first half of the year.34 This represents the highest spending from the region in at least five years.
Hong Kong & Mainland China: Art Basel Hong Kong, which held a very trimmed-down but still largely successful edition in May 2021 after a 2020 cancellation, remains the leading art fair in Asia, according to industry sources.35 Other stalwarts on the mainland include Jing Art .
A major reason for Hong Kong’s popularity is its business-friendly legal and financial infrastructure, which asks international businesses to navigate considerably less red tape than mainland China.
Taiwan: Like South Korea, Taiwan has been angling to lure international dealers with its affordable real estate and deep-pocketed collectors.
Looking ahead: Western galleries are increasingly eyeing Asian cities beyond Hong Kong, Beijing, and Shanghai to open new spaces.
Hong Kong & Mainland China: Many of the works by international artists that broke records at Hong Kong auctions over the past year, including examples by Avery Singer, Joel Mesler, Jonathan Chapline, and Javier Calleja, were snapped up by Asian collectors aged 45 or younger.42 These new power players come mainly from two different backgrounds, experts say.
Now, individuals are starting to catch up, and younger buyers are entering the fray—most prominently, the K-pop star Choi Seung-hyun .
Looking ahead: Western contemporary art is growing in popularity among Asian collectors—but they don’t necessarily like what’s already popular in the West.
Plus, the minimalist art movement Dansaekhwa, which coalesced in the mid-1970s, became a global art-market craze about five years ago.48 The group’s artists are likely to get even more exposure next year, when a major exhibition on experimental South Korean art from the 1960s and 1970s travels from Korea’s National Museum of Modern and Contemporary Art to the Solomon R.
Artnet Price Database: From Michelangelo drawings to Warhol paintings, Le Corbusier chairs to Banksy prints, you will find over 14 million color-illustrated art auction records dating back to 1985.
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