Money

Auction houses expect strong spring

By Qin Zhongwei (China Daily)
Updated: 2010-03-30 07:53

A woman submits a bid during a charity auction at China Guardian Auction Co Ltd that was in aid of quake-ravaged Haiti. Wang Jing / China Daily

Beijing's auction houses are in buoyant mood about the upcoming spring season after last year's autumn sales and the March quarterly bidding wars showed signs that the art market was emerging from the economic downturn.

Last year, the autumn auction results for the city's major auction houses demonstrated a strong recovery. The total sales of the major auction houses reached over 5.67 billion yuan. For Beijing-based China Guardian Auction, China's largest auction company, sales reached 1.532 billion yuan, a new peak in its 16-year history.

The regular and small-scale March quarterly auctions are usually considered as warm-ups for the big Spring auctions, most of which are scheduled to go under hammer in early June, and which are one of the two major auctions of the year.

China Guardian Auction claimed that the total sales of their quarterly auction from March 20 to 22 reached 260 million yuan, another record for the company, and a significant increase on last year's March sales of 140 million yuan.

Beijing Poly Auction, another major auction house, announced nearly 120 million yuan in sales in its recent auction that wrapped up on March 25, compared with a miserly 40 million yuan for the same period last year.

Zhao Xu, executive director of the company, which will celebrate its fifth anniversary in June, told METRO that, "it shows a steady growth of the art auction market after the economic crisis, and that the auctions are attracting more people who want to invest in art."

To attract more collectors, Poly Auction held its spring preview in Taipei at the end of March, the first time that a mainland auction house had staged a preview across the Straits, and they have been to the United States five times since 2009 to collect high-quality artwork, showing a renewed confidence for this year's auctions, according to Zhao.

And the growth seems very likely to continue, according to Wang Mingxian, a contemporary artist and professor from China Art Academy, who said that contemporary Chinese art, which created a big bubble that burst during the economic crisis, is now back on track.

"The prices for contemporary art may not repeat the crazy success of 2006 or 2007, but they are showing signs of rational recovery, although it will take a long time to fully recover," he told METRO.

As more money floods into the art auction market, some insiders said it is understandable as collecting high-quality art is much safer than other investments.

A manager from the marketing department of a major auction house, who preferred to remain anonymous, told METRO that as the outlook for real estate and the stock market is still uncertain, she saw some businessmen, who used to invest their money in real estate or stocks, turning to art as a less risky alternative.