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International Herald Tribune

BASEL, Switzerland: First, Western art galleries turned east, moving into China to cash in on its booming contemporary art scene. Now, Chinese galleries are trekking west.

Seven Chinese galleries participated in the main fair of Art Basel and in its satellite events this year, showing some of the most spectacular works in Art Unlimited, the exhibition platform for large-scale projects, video installations and live performances aimed at the institutional art market.

The Boers-Li Gallery in Beijing, a first-timer at the fair, showed Qiu Anxiong's "Staring Into Amnesia" (2007), an authentic 1960s Chinese train car inside which black-and-white war footage was projected onto the windows.

"My work is not about ideology. It is about reviving the memory of China," Qiu said.

There were also works by a three-man collective, Yangjiang Group, presented by Vitamin Creative Space of Guangzhou, China, which were shown in both the Art Unlimited section and Art Statements, a section featuring emerging artists working with rising galleries.

In Art Unlimited, the group presented "Garden III (Pine Trees)," (2008), a faux Chinese garden installation with trees, a path onto a bridge and a paper pond moving to music. At Art Statements, they showed scenes from daily life, including gamblers socializing around a dinner table.

Moving in the opposite direction, two big New York art galleries are about to open satellites in China.

China's economic boom has produced a growing class of wealthy private collectors whose interest in the local art market is reinforcing demand from Western collectors.

"Powerful buying from the West has been reinforced recently by intensive interest from new buyers from Mainland China, some 30 to 50 of them, as well as from Singapore and Taiwan," said Michael Goedhuis, a New York art dealer and a veteran of the Chinese art scene since 1993.

In July, the James Cohan Gallery, from the Chelsea neighborhood of Manhattan, will be the first U.S. gallery to open in Shanghai, where its senior New York director, Arthur Solway, who is fluent in Mandarin, has already relocated.

"We want to address the second wave of collecting that will inevitably happen in China," James Cohan said from New York. "There is a certain maturity process in all collecting markets. Right now it is very focused on the domestic market, but we see mainlanders and Taiwanese focusing more on international collecting."

The PaceWildenstein Gallery, also in New York, will follow in August with a spectacular space in Dashanzi, the Beijing art district that has developed in and around Factory 798, a former munitions plant.

"China, Beijing specifically, is just emerging internationally as an art-making center," said Peter Boris, vice president of PaceWildenstein, who will be chairman of Pace Beijing.

"There are now only a few buyers in mainland China, but there will be more. Our target clientele are Asian collectors and the new wealth created there," Boris said in an interview at Art Basel.

The moves by PaceWildenstein and Cohan coincided with a new, more outward-looking wave of creativity sweeping over the Chinese contemporary art scene.

"We are starting to show the cosmopolitan, international attitude of the new generation of Chinese artists," said Primo Marella, owner of the Primo Marella Gallery in Milan who opened a gallery in Beijing in 2005. "There are only about a dozen."

"You cannot tell from their work that they are Chinese," he added. "They express strong ideas with a lot of freshness."

Marella showed new works by the painter and installation artist Chen Ke, the sculptor Liu Ding and the photographer Jiang Zhi at Scope Basel, a satellite fair of Art Basel.

"There is a huge explosion of creativity in China right now," said Goedhuis, the New York dealer. "Chinese artists, musicians, architects, film-makers, designers are creating a new language to express a totally new reality."

And the timing is not surprising. "It is happening that much more intensely in China because society has transformed in just 15 years."

This cultural revolution has flowered largely without Chinese institutional support. "There are virtually no contemporary art museums in China," Goedhuis said. "The government's claim to build 100 or 1,000 new museums has yet to become reality. There is very little state support of artists, if any."

In the absence of official support, private art centers like the Ullens Center for Contemporary Art in Beijing, funded by two Belgian collectors, Guy and Myriam Ullens, have opened to show private collections of Chinese art.

When not indifferent, official attitudes in China remain repressive, with government censors continuing to hunt down, albeit haphazardly, works deemed politically subversive, sexually explicit or culturally sensitive.

In 2006, the artists He An and Zhang Ding were imprisoned for taking part in a group show that included a work with peasants, colored gold but holding up blank placards, which was interpreted as a comment on the helplessness of the rural poor subjected to compulsory land seizures.

In February, a first exhibition of works by the Shanghai artist Zhang Huan was canceled at the Shanghai Art Museum. The authorities banned such works as giant sculptures of deformed bodies covered with cowhide, which they asserted were inappropriate Buddhist references.

Still, in the age of globalization, local censorship cannot stop work from being shown in the West.

Two of the "offensive" works by Zhang were reportedly bought by François Pinault, owner of Christie's. A third work, "Giant No. 3" (2008), a 15-foot-high, or 4.6-meter, installation made of cowhide, steel, wood and polystyrene foam, is on view at PaceWildenstein in New York through July 25.

"We are not overly concerned with censorship," said Boris of PaceWildenstein. "It creates a tension in China that is absent in New York or London. It allows for heroic art to be made."

Matching the official indifference or hostility to the artists has been the government's indifference to the free-wheeling art market, where speculation and an absence of oversight and regulation have given rise to talk of price fixing that would be deemed impermissible in the West.

In December, the French auction house Artcurial and the privately owned Chinese group Sun Media created the first Western auction house to pioneer into mainland China. On Jan. 20, Artcurial China held its first auction, with Francis Briest, one of Artcurial's principal Paris auctioneers, symbolically holding the hammer for the first lot.

The auction was a big success, the company said, bringing in $8.3 million for 72 lots, nearly double the high estimate, with only one lot unsold. Dominated by local traditional and figurative painting, the lots included a sculpture by a contemporary French artist, Richard Texier, entitled "Mimesis Deus."

With an estimate between 120,000 yuan and 160,000 yuan, or $17,350 and $23,130, the Texier sculpture soared to a hammer price of 3.36 million yuan, many times higher than any other work sold by the artist, according to data available on Artprice, a leading provider of art information on the Web.

According to Briest, the price reflected the unpredictability of auctions. "The art market is inherently irrational," he said. "If the hammer price was high, it is because at least two bidders were seduced by the piece and fought for it."

Other observers had a different explanation.

"It is common practice in China for auction houses to have some kind of arrangement in regard to the bidding process, because there are no laws against it in China," said Li Liang, director of the Eastlink Gallery in Shanghai.

Such arrangements can be used to create "buzz" around an artist's work, said a person with knowledge of the Chinese auction scene who asked not to be identified due to the sensitivity of the subject.

"Auction houses in China enter into agreements with artists or consignors to sell works without an established market value," the person said. "The seller agrees to pay a 10 percent commission on the hammer price. In exchange, the house engages in 'fake' bidding to sell the piece. That helps create a baseline value for the piece.

"An inquiry into the auction house's account would show that the hammer price is not paid in, just the 10 percent commission."

Briest, responding to questions, dismissed Artcurial's responsibility in the Texier sale. "We are aware that transparency is a relative term in China, but we do not condone such practices," he said.

Artcurial was only a shareholder in Artcurial China, Briest added. Legal responsibility rested with Sun Media, the Chinese partner, "in whom we trust," he said. "They have certified the results of this auction."

Meanwhile, transparent or not, the China market increasingly is attracting not only Western galleries and auctioneers, but also organizers of art fairs.

Last month, the Paris fair ArtParis made its debut in Shenzhen, China. Meanwhile, the Shanghai ShContemporary fair is planning to hold its second edition in September, despite a heated dispute between one of its original organizers, Pierre Huber, a dealer in Geneva who was artistic director of the fair last year, and the Parisian dealer Enrico Navarra.

Navarra accused Huber of a conflict of interest between his position as director and his role as a dealer.

"In the West, you could not organize an international fair where the sole artistic director is an active dealer and uses his position within the fair to promote his own artists in competition with fair participants," Navarra said.

For this year's edition of ShContemporary, Huber - who was also under pressure after a French television program last year showed him apparently bullying Chinese artists into selling their work to him cheaply - has been replaced as artistic director of the fair by a 10-person committee.

In a telephone interview, Huber denied a conflict of interest and declined to discuss Navarra. "For me, ShContemporary was, first and foremost, a cultural project which was destroyed by the commercial interests of others," he said.

Amid the feeding frenzy of galleristas and auctioneers, the artists sometimes look like swimmers in a shark cage - wealthy swimmers, that is.

"Some of the artists, propelled by the attention and the intense demand, have become very rich by Chinese standards," Goedhuis said.

But, "there is no structure in China for artists to sell through dealers who set prices and a career path for the good artists to flourish," he added. "Artists are left floundering, trying to make a fast buck on the one hand, and do creative work on the other. Meantime, they are besieged by buyers, dealers and auction houses."

Goedhuis himself was at the center of a recent controversy when part of the Estella Collection of Chinese contemporary art, which he had amassed for a group of collectors, was auctioned at Sotheby's Hong Kong in April. Angered artists said they had been duped into selling, for low prices, pieces that fetched millions at the auction. Goedhuis has denied knowledge of the collectors' intent to sell.

Meanwhile, auction prices continue to soar, despite some fears that they may be due for a correction.

At the Christie's Hong Kong evening sale of Asian contemporary art on May 24, a new record was achieved for Yue Minjun, whose 1993 work "Gweong-Gweong" sold for 54 million Hong Kong dollars, or $7 million, more than 10 times the price it fetched when it went under the hammer in 2005.

"By just looking at auction prices, people assume that the Chinese market is a bubble, that there is no historical or intellectual grounding to the art, no gravity to the market," said Boris of PaceWildenstein. "In reality, we are witnessing the birth of an emerging identity."

PaceWildenstein's move into Beijing reflects its commitment to a long term view, he said. "We are doing a job for Zhang Huan and other Chinese artists, to bring them into Western collections and museums. We are working to integrate them into world art history where they belong."

Goedhuis, too, says the Chinese market is no bubble, although his reasoning is more prosaic.

"There are over a billion people in China," he said. "If only a few more people enter the art market, prices will go even higher. There is enough wealth in China to make Chinese art extremely expensive.

"China is the dominant reality for the rest of history. There is nothing stopping China."