Buying Back One's Heritage
“China, China China”! The new cool kid on the block of economic superpowers is cultivating its passion for art. According to Statista, about two hundred new museums open yearly in mainland China and during the past decades it has become the third largest art market worldwide only surpassed by the US and the UK. But Chinese art collectors are leaving auctions with more than just Picassos’ in the basket. The new art collectors are favouring their own homeland’s old arts and antiques. China’s slightly darker 20th-century history might explain why.
In the mid-1960s, the Chinese communist leader, Mao Zedong, ordered the cultural revolution. The goal was to eliminate the old fours: customs, culture, habits, and ideas. Red guards would enter Chinese homes ruthlessly destroying books, vases, sculptures, and paintings. It was a cultural homicide. As a consequence, today many historical Chinese antiques and artworks are found outside of China, notably, the pieces that were robbed from the country by westerners during colonial times. The scarcity of artworks combined with the nouveau rich generation in China has created a shockwave through the market for Chinese art. Last year, new auction records were set with the sale of Qi Baishi Ink brush paintings for roughly 120 million euro. Most of these old artworks are kept in private collections or owned by museums and are never set on sale. Yet, this has not been a constraint for the billionaires in Beijing. In 2010, the Chinese pavilion of the Drottningholm palace in Sweden was robbed. Just months later 56 Chinese art pieces at the KOBE museum in Bergen were stolen, and then in 2015 displays of the Chinese collection the French Chateau Fontainebleau were taken.
Ralph Lexner, head of the department for Asian antiques and artworks at auction house Bruun Rasmussen in Copenhagen emphasise how prestige and investment are key drivers for the Chinese customers. “trends can change within months. We sometimes get bids five times the valuation”, he states. These customer characteristics have both made the market more volatile, but also brought prices to new heights. Nevertheless, it has not been a straight-line rollercoaster ride to the top. The market has also had contractions on the way. Ralph had experienced loyal customers keep coming back to purchase antiques and artworks. One of them was Mr. Chang the Shanghai-based thermostat producer. “My client suddenly didn’t need gifts for his high-end tea salon in Shanghai. At first, I was unable to draw the connection, but suddenly I understood the purpose of his purchases” Ralph explains. To keep good business relations Ralph’s client had bought extravagant gifts for his thermostat customers. However, in 2014 new anti-corruption laws had been enforced in China and consequently, more clear-cut constraints on gift sizes for business had been set. Ralph underscores how there was a cut in the demand that year and how the business gifts played a significant role in the demand equation within his department.
“They bid beyond what they can afford”