Contemporary art remains both surreal and lucrative

is a Mint columnist and a former Financial Times foreign correspondent.

One of the most commented upon displays at Asia’s biggest art show, Art Basel Hong Kong, was a video art work called Cut Suits by Fuyuhiko Takata. It featured half a dozen male models solicitously bending over each other with scissors in their hands and cutting up their suits till they end up bare chested with their clothes in tatters. It looked as if an otherwise disciplined Japanese executive had suffered a mid-life crisis and lost even his sense of propriety. In the foreground to this video, with Tchaikovsky playing as its soundtrack, was a pile of shredded suits.

Every visit to Art Basel Hong Kong, which was back at full force this year, taking over downtown Hong Kong’s largest convention halls, leaves me convinced that contemporary art is a surreal theatre of the absurd. The huge installations of pop art in East Asia, heavily influenced in some cases by Hello Kitty, only heighten this view. Takata’s Cut Suits sought to signify that the fabled 70-to-80 hour a week slogging Japanese ‘salariman’ was finally throwing off his shackles. Like so much of contemporary art, the Hiroshima native’s debut at Art Basel was thoroughly derivative, a homage to Yoko Ono’s work six decades ago. I couldn’t help thinking that Takata was having a hearty laugh at everyone on his way to the bank—at the ‘salariman’ as well as the art world.

And don’t get me started on the gigantic circus tent of a red dress by Japan’s Sunayama Norico that stood out at Art Central, the supposedly edgier art show that also ran in Hong Kong at the end of last month. This work allowed children and adults to crawl under it and discover sketch pens and paper to create their own art. Maybe this was an effort to further democratize art? Who knows?

As light entertainment, this is engaging and amusing, but the art market is also serious business. A report from UBS observes that last year, “global art sales eased to an estimated USD 65 billion, showcasing resilience despite a slowdown of 4% year-onyear… The US maintained its position as the leading market worldwide, accounting for 42% of sales by value. China became the second-largest global art market, with its share rising to 19%, while the UK moved to third place with a share of 17%.” Sales in China were up 9% last year to an estimated $12.2 billion, but this reveals as much it obscures. The rebound followed covid restrictions being lifted in the first half of 2023, so the market was boosted by an element of exaggerated demand. In the later months of 2023, auctions slowed again as the effects of China’s property crisis and general economic slowdown hurt sales.

The giant panda in the art world that is not discussed much is how a significant portion of sales to Chinese buyers—a quarter to almost half of sales in some cases—never come to fruition despite having been reportedly ‘sold’ at auctions.

There is also the additional issue that buying very large ticket items is also a time-honoured way of somehow evading Beijing’s capital controls. Under President Xi Jinping, this is much harder to do, which has implications for the frothy contemporary mainland Chinese art market. Still, I eagerly await an artwork that foregrounds piles of shredded renminbi notes.

Like so many people who pontificate about the art market, I may sound like I know what I am talking about, but my own record of art buying suggests I am just as impulsive and foolish as the next buyer. I had the advantage of living in Hong Kong in the late 1990s and early 2000s, when the mainland Chinese art market was taking off. I could see that the ingredients for exponential increases in prices were there: as in India, a large wealthy diaspora, a new upper middle-class in Beijing and Shanghai, and the added rocket booster of large-scale capital flight from China. I knew all this and yet chose not to get on board because I

The giant panda in art halls isn’t surging Chinese interest in art but how often auction winners from China fail to wrap deals. Art is said to be a conduit for capital flight. Thankfully, there’s good art too. couldn’t imagine living with most of this art; garish, even gruesome self-portraits, repeated over and over again in a couple of artists’ oeuvre, for example. A cleverer friend made a huge profit with the sale of just one of these mainland Chinese artist’s works. Instead, I bought a relatively littleknown Hong Kong artist. His beautiful, witty rendering of a Hong Kong couple posing for wedding day photographs, while another waits their turn to be photographed against the backdrop of a colonial building, an old-world mania in the city at the time, hangs over my dining table.

Still, for all the silly money spent on contemporary art, records are always set, as was the case in 2023, by artworks by established geniuses of yesteryear, such as Pablo Picasso and Gustav Klimt, both of which sold for well over $100 million. A work by Chinese Old Master painter Wang Meng sold for almost $40 million. A post-script to Art Basel Hong Kong last month was that the highest amount paid for a single work was for a 1986 painting by Willem de Kooning. The abstract expressionist artist, who died in 1997, would likely have been smiling that quality ultimately stands out amid this raucous circus of art in our times.