Far East strives for return of antiquities

Through international auction houses, Chinese antiquities from European and American collections are now returning to the Far East. Derek da Cunha examines this tendency

The throngs of people in the room were conversing largely in Cantonese, Hokkien and Mandarin. Theirs was one of anticipated excitement just before the start of the auction.

The venue, not some place in Taipei or Kowloon, but the Great Rooms of the international fine art auctioneers Christie's, in London on June 6 this year. The occasion: The Summer sale of Fine Chinese Ceramics and Works of Art.

The difference between this auction and those of previous years could not have been more striking or revealing.

The European and American presence was heavily outnumbered by the ethnic Chinese, who had descended on London from all around the world, but principally from Hong Kong, Taiwan, Singapore and, yes, China itself.

It was these collectors, dealers and museum curators from the Far East who engaged in competitive bidding for the ceramics, bronzes and jades on offer, leaving the Europeans and Americans, once a force in this market, out in the cold. Prices of many of the art works on June 6 reached astronomical highs, and almost all went into the hands of the bidders from the Far East.

Did the ethnic Chinese buyers come to London to repossess their culture? The well-known art critic of the International Herald Tribune, Souren Melikian, thinks so. It was he who, in a column earlier this year, first brought attention to the phenomenon of the sudden salutary interest "on the market for Chinese art of their overseas communities".

In a subsequent column, Melikian concluded that ethnic Chinese buyers had moved decisively into the art market to reclaim their heritage.

Much of that heritage has been in the hands of European and American families with the sorts of blue-ribbon lineages stretching back to diplomatic, missionary and commercial activity in China over the last two hundred years or so. And now part of that heritage is coming onto the auction block.

The reasons for this are varied. But a key reason has to do with the unfavorable economic conditions in the West, including high rates of taxes and huge outlays to upkeep family estates. While part of the European and American la haute have fallen on hard times, the situation halfway round the world is almost the reverse. The renaissance of East Asia has spawned several phenomena. The quest by East Asians to return to their cultural roots has been one such phenomenon. Closely related to that has been the advent of the nouveau riches and their desire to spend money on the finer things in life, including the art works of their cultural heritage.

Many of this new "class" of art collectors hail from Hong Kong, Taiwan and, in increasing numbers, from the southern Chinese provinces of Guangdong and Fujian, which have thrown up millionaire-entrepreneurs by the score. Their forays into the Chinese art market have been keenly felt over the past year-and-a-half. And their acquisitiveness has propelled certain categories of that market, such as Ming and Qing imperial porcelain, to previously unheard of price levels.

In porcelain, the surging prices are being sustained by the fact that the apparent aim of each of the new collectors is to amass a personal collection of between 30 and 50 objects, each of which with star quality a conversation piece in its own right.

The new collectors have also affected the art market in other ways. A scarcity of good quality works, which has forced one or two usually hoity-toity auction houses to now source consignments of art works from "middle-range" collectors, has been one result.

The auction of June 6 certainly gave evidence of quality drying up, and so too did the auction which Christie's held in Hong Kong between April 30 and May 2 this year. This earlier event produced another significant development resulting from the buying power of ethnic Chinese collectors not seen before.

As long-time followers of the Hong Kong art scene would attest, the success or otherwise of an art auction is closely related to the performance of the Hong Kong bourse. A surging stockmarket would largely ensure the success of an auction. Conversely, a stockmarket heading south would produce a lukewarm response in the salesroom.

The Spring auction in Hong Kong saw the de-linkage of stockmarket from art market. And this was a truly remarkable development. In the week preceding the auction, from April 24 to May 1, the Hang Seng index fell some 5 percent in value, or more than 400 points after months of anemic performance. Yet, Christie's chalked up one of its best results for Chinese art not seen in a long while, with hammer prices of some lots of late 19th century porcelain, which would have been sniffed at a few years ago, more than doubling their low estimates and setting new records for their category.

If this suggests anything, it is that Chinese art is beginning to attain an intrinsic value that far exceeds its purely aesthetic quality.

Indeed, all evidence indicates that it is currently the most dynamic sector in the international art market, and that surging values, particularly of paintings and porcelain (the latter holding the added cachet of being a repository of an enormous body of scholarship), will likely be sustained over the long haul. This is the logical consequence of the combination of strong cultural sentiment, investment potential and scarcity. Indeed, one thing is for sure, as China's economic development runs full tilt, the repossession of its historical artifacts from the Western world will move into higher gear, illustrating the view that artistic vibrancy can coexist with economic dynamism.

The writer, a collector of Qing porcelain, is a Senior Fellow at the Institute of Southeast, Asian Studies, Singapore and is Editor of Trends.