THE POWER OF YOUTH
Sonia Kolesnikov-Jessop discovers that a younger base of collectors in Asia is looking beyond the region
A sian collectors, in particular Chinese collectors, have made their presence keenly felt in the art market in the past 10 years.
According to Art Basel and UBS’s The Art Market 2018 report, China’s share of the global art market – now estimated at US$63.7 billion – has ballooned from 8 percent in 2007 to 21 percent in 2017.
For the first half of 2018, Christie’s reported a 24 percent increase in new buyers from mainland China and noted that 60 percent of its Asian client spend globally was now on works outside of Asian art categories. For the same period, Asian clients accounted for 28 percent of Sotheby’s aggregated auction sales and had purchased eight of the top 20 lots it had sold to date, while the number of Asian clients buying Western art at Sotheby’s worldwide had grown by 28 percent – at its New York Impressionist & Modern Art Evening Sale in May, a quarter of all works sold were acquired by Asian private collectors, while Asian spending nearly tripled at Sotheby’s London’s Contemporary Art Day and Evening Auctions in June.