THE POWER OF YOUTH
Sonia Kolesnikov-jessop discovers that a younger base of collectors in Asia is looking beyond the region
Asiancollectors, 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.
Interestingly, Sotheby’s also reported an increased participation of young buyers during the same period, with 23 percent of its buyers in Asia below 40 years old; the figure climbed to 40 percent at Hong Kong’s Curated: Turn It Up auction last June. This trend is also noted by Sundaram Tagore, who owns galleries in Singapore, Hong Kong and New York. “Chinese collectors happen to be a lot younger and are shaping the artistic ecosystem with their collecting process,” he shares. “Some of them are highly influential individuals who are building galleries and museums, and on occasions, using art as a vehicle to create social influence in their culture.”
CHANGING TASTES
Tagore notes that some of these younger collectors come from a tradition of collecting antiquities, with parents who have collected art of the past. “Younger collectors who have taken charge are well conversant in contemporary artistic language,” he says. “Many have studied art history or some aspect of the humanities and they’re often immersed in the international art circuit. They’re proactive in terms of self- education, attending important art fairs, biennales and so on.”
“Chinese collectors first bought Chinese art, but as they learned more about what was out there via art fairs and top collectors travelling around to different fairs, they’ve paved the way for others to follow suit,” adds Emi Eu, director of STPI – Creative Workshop & Gallery. “Now, it’s really a full-fledged, broad collecting base; the buying is there. Right now, the Chinese collectors that we see at Art Basel are very interested in Western art while still being supportive of their local artists.”
“Younger collectors who have taken charge are well conversant in contemporary artistic language” — Sundaram Tagore
This shift in interest can also be seen in the recent offerings at auction houses. Last June, Sotheby’s Curated: Turn It Up auction, described as “curated through the eyes of young Asian collectors”, offered what it considered “accessibly priced works” by pioneering contemporary and street artists as well as cutting- edge pieces from emerging artists. The result was a white glove sale (100 percent sold), which Yuki Terase, Sotheby’s Head of Contemporary Art, Asia, saw as testament to the “fast-growing collecting vigour of young Asian art lovers”.
In 2018, Sotheby’s Hong Kong also held its first sale entirely dedicated to Western Old Masters, with works by Rembrandt and lesser-known Dutch masters of the period. Justifying the move, Patti Wong, Chairman of Sotheby’s Asia, said: “In the last five years, we’ve seen the number of Asian bidders at Sotheby’s Old Master Paintings sales double and the spend increase tenfold compared to the prior five-year period, reflecting the growing appetite for traditional Western art.”
The Swiss MCH Group, the parent company of Art Basel, recently reorganised its strategy and while it announced plans to divest from the India Art Fair and also pulled out of Art SG, to be held in Singapore later this year from October 31 to November 3, it remains committed to Asia and is looking to expand Masterpiece – a cross- collecting fair in London that brings antiques, old masters and contemporary art under one roof – to a new location in Asia.
SOUTH-EAST ASIA REGROUPING
Eu notes, though, that South-east Asian collectors’ interest in contemporary art has dwindled a little. “Right now, the focus is on collecting modern art,” she shares. And while these collectors have traditionally supported their respective home markets, they are branching out and collecting works by contemporary artists outside of the region as well.
Tagore points out that there are also differences in buying patterns among Asian collectors. For example, he says, while there is a “fairly solid group of collectors in Singapore, they are more focused on artists largely from South-east Asia. The expat community in Singapore, though, tends to buy art from across the globe.”
“Singaporean buyers are also more social,” he adds, “so they share information with one another at parties, openings and social gatherings, whereas collectors from China are often more independent in collecting. The buying habits of collectors from China also lean more towards the higher numbers, as they’re used to six-figure sums, and that frequently happens to be part of the conversation.”
Eu hopes that the S.E. A. Focus, a new pop-up event offering work for sale happening this January at Gillman Barracks as part of Singapore Art Week 2019, will help turn attention on the region.
Magnus Renfrew, co-founder of Art SG, sees “great potential for the South-east Asia market with its huge population that’s very affluent”, noting that while no individual domestic market in the region is “big enough to sustain an art fair of the level of ambition we’re looking to put on, collectively, the different collector bases are large enough”.
He adds: “We really want to create a hub fair for South-east Asia. We’re looking to keep it realistic in terms of scale; we’re not trying to recreate Art Basel. But right across Asia, I think there are opportunities for art fairs, which are currently a little bit behind where they should be in the sense of attaining global standards of practice, in terms of having a transparent selection process and having a selection committee that reviews the applications.”