Sotheby's Offers $19 Million of Chinese Contemporary Art

By Scott Reyburn

Feb. 14 (Bloomberg) -- Sotheby's Feb. 27 sale of contemporary art in London will include the most valuable group of works by Chinese artists it has offered in Europe, the auction house said.

The 10 Chinese contemporary works are estimated at 7 million pounds to 9.8 million pounds ($13.7 million-$19.2 million) in a 70-lot auction of contemporary art that has an overall valuation of 72 million pounds to 102.9 million pounds, said a press statement issued yesterday.

The Chinese group includes paintings by Zhang Xiaogang, Yue Minjun, Liu Ye and Yan Pei-Ming, living artists who all have fetched over $1 million at auction, according to the saleroom-result database Artnet.

``The same artists crop up again and again,'' said Michael Hue-Williams of London's Albion Gallery, which specializes in art from emerging economies. ``The Chinese contemporary market is all about brand recognition.''

The Albion Gallery exhibits at the ShContemporary art fair in Shanghai, where Chinese artists favored by westerners such as Yue and Zhang are known as the ``millionaire's club of painters,'' said Hue-Williams.

The French collector Marcel Brient has entered four paintings into Sotheby's auction, including Zhang's 2001 ``Big Family No. 1'' from the artist's ``Bloodlines'' series, estimated at 1.5 million pounds to 2 million pounds. Sotheby's, which has its main salerooms in New York, said the three-meter-wide painting is the largest work by Zhang to have come to auction.

Museum Muddle

Brient is a Paris-based collector whose three-year attempt to open a private museum in a 2,000-square-meter former factory at Montreuil-sous-Bois, France, has been stalled by technical difficulties and legal disputes, according to reports published this week on the Web site http://www.lesechos.fr and previously in Le Monde.

All four of the Brient lots, plus two others in the Chinese section, are guaranteed, said Sotheby's press officer Rachel Duffield. Overall, 13 lots carry guarantees in the Sotheby's contemporary sale, including a Francis Bacon painting with a low estimate of 18 million pounds.

Another collector has consigned ``Overwhelm,'' an early painting by Yue, dated 1994, with an estimate of 1.2 million pounds to 1.8 million pounds. Yan's three- meter-high 2006 work, ``Silver Bruce Lee,'' is expected to fetch between 500,000 pounds and 700,000 pounds.

In October 2007, Sotheby's sold Yue's 1995 picture, ``Execution,'' for 2.9 million pounds with fees, then a record for any Chinese contemporary work of art sold at auction, said Artnet.

100-Fold Gain

In January, a survey commissioned by the European Fine Art Foundation, organizers of the Tefaf fair in Maastricht, the Netherlands, said that from 2003 to 2006 the value of Chinese contemporary art sales had increased to 88.4 million euros ($129 million) from 889,000 euros.

In the same period, the average price per lot rose to 45,456 euros from 13,266 euros, according to statistics supplied for the report by the French-based auction-result database Artprice.

``Chinese contemporary art is still rising in value, while other areas are slackening,'' said Hue-Williams. ``Prices for great western artists like Warhol, Richter and Hirst have now reached a plateau.''

Hirst Hit

Continuing uncertainty in the world's financial markets led to weakened demand for works by certain European and U.S. artists at Christie's Feb. 6 auction of contemporary art in London. Thirty-one percent of the lots failed to sell, with works by Warhol, Richter and Hirst carrying high estimates among the casualties. Five out of the six Chinese contemporary works included in Christie's sale found buyers.

For the first time, Sotheby's and Phillips de Pury's February auctions of contemporary art in London will take place three weeks later than Christie's.

Phillips de Pury's Feb. 28 sale at its newly modernized former Royal Mail office in Howick Street, Victoria, will include 17 works by Chinese artists. Wang Guangyi's two-meter-square painting, ``Great Criticism: Disney'' (2000), has the highest estimate -- between 200,000 pounds and 250,000 pounds.

In October 2007, Phillips de Pury sold 45 works from the Farber Collection of Chinese contemporary art in London for 10.1 million pounds with fees, said Johanna Frydman, a spokeswoman for the auction house.

(Scott Reyburn writes about the art market for Bloomberg News. Any opinions expressed are his own.)

To contact the reporter on this story: Scott Reyburn in London at sreyburn@hotmail.com
Last Updated: February 13, 2008 18:59 EST

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