At the fifth edition of the Art Basel Fair in Hong Kong this year, top businessmen and celebrities were not the protagonists of the show. Although before the fair there were some worries in terms of sales due to the economic downturn in Europe and America and the Mainland’s assets control measures, the fair was a big success and sales fired through the roof. Collectors poured in from all over the world and collections priced within 500,000 US dollars by potential blue-chip artists were snapped up the quickest in huge amounts. The buying energy was, apparently, ‘as high as a Sale season in the departmental store’.
In the last five years, the Art Basel Fair in Hong Kong brought a strong artistic atmosphere to this seaside city. During this year’s fair, the organizers sent out 6 thousand VIP cards, attracting nearly 80,000 visitors in just 5 days. In previous editions of the fair, you may have encountered Chinese contemporary artist Zhou Chunya’s paintings of Jack Ma, Alibaba Group, art show frequent visitor celebrity Edison Chen and Korean actress Song Hye-kyo. This year, you probably saw famed director Wang Kar-wai, Chinese actress Vicki Zhao, superstar David Beckham as well as countless well-known or, unknown Hong Kong film and television celebrities.
A total of 242 galleries from 34 countries participated this year, including 29 galleries which joined for the first time. At the fair, many galleries said that this year’s sales performance was excellent and there were many new collectors visiting, especially young collectors. In fact, it was not only younger generations from the Mainland and Hong Kong, other regions’ new art enthusiasts are getting younger as well. These collectors may be collecting to build up their own art investment portfolios or, selecting new, interesting works on behalf of their parents who were already seasoned art collectors.
From the movements of the Art Basel Fair this year, we can deduce that the contemporary art investment market is becoming more diverse with more collectors, artists and galleries. Big time collectors were mainly from Asia, such as China, Hong Kong and Taiwan, as well as Southeast Asian countries such as Singapore, Indonesia and Malaysia. Galleries grew confident to recommend higher-priced works which may not be the case a few years ago. The distance between Asian collectors’ collecting tastes and judgment for whats ‘high-quality’ and ‘collectible’ in comparison to experienced European/American collectors are getting much closer. However, the factors influencing Asian collectors to buy art are slightly more complex, especially in key areas with rapid economic-changing directions. And public institutions collecting Art are lesser compared to Europe and the United States, so the main focus are private collectors and rapidly-growing corporate collections for larger works. Based on ‘Art Economics’ 2017 market report, global art market sales rose all the way. 2016’s sales in art fairs were 13.3 billion US dollars, a staggering increase of 57% compared to the earlier years such as in 2010.
All in all, it has became a cycle for art fairs to try and make things as interesting as possible by bringing in a wide variety of arts every year, improving the exhibition experience and without a doubt, the collecting strength of the Asian art market marks an influential role in facilitating this positive movement.