Why did it take so long?
An International Art Fair in Hong Kong.
Top quality art from around the world was recently brought to the Hong Kong Convention and Exhibition Centre for ART HK08. It was the first such fair the territory has seen in over a decade and was the biggest, most dazzling, and most money-laden one ever. Just over 100 galleries from 17 countries (7 of them in Asia) plus China, Hong Kong and Taiwan showed the work of approximately 850 contemporary and modern artists, many of whom had not been seen here before. Hong Kong has long pursued all that glitters so why did it take so long to sponsor such an important event in today’s red hot market for contemporary art? Magnus Renfrew, director of the fair and a man with considerable experience with contemporary Asian art, both in galleries and at auction (Contrasts Gallery, Shanghai and Bonham’s auctions in London) explains that the context for contemporary art in Asia is now completely different than it was about 10 years ago, when Hong Kong first hosted a much smaller fair. That event had no international blue chip participation, and its longevity was cut short by the Asian economic crisis of the late 90s. Things are different now. Contemporary Asian art, especially from China, is receiving worldwide attention, both for its quality and its sometimes spectacular prices; and Asian economies are doing well, not just regionally, but in global terms. Collecting escalates as the economy grows and according to a representative from Christie’s auctions, 27% of the world’s wealth is now held in Asia-Pacific, where the economy is growing at a rate of 8.6% per year. “People are looking for different ways of spending money”, Renfrew explains. “Mainland collectors began by buying mostly contemporary art but as comfort levels and knowledge levels increase, buyers are getting more adventurous.” Some, he said, are beginning to buy blue chip international work – by artists such as Picasso and Warhol. An art fair that includes such international representation is a first for Hong Kong, he noted happily, and “we expect not just sales of Chinese and Asian art to Western buyers but blue chip Western art to Asian buyers.” The fair is also unique among international art fairs, he said, because of the large number of local galleries participating. Hong Kong is the city most represented in the fair, and its galleries account for ten percent of total number of exhibitors.
ART HK 08 is the result of more than a year of planning, an intensive global marketing campaign, and a rigorous selection process in which many galleries were turned away. Charles Merewether, head of the event’s advisory group, called the fair “the beginning of a beautiful relationship” between the Hong Kong government, commercial, and non-commercial interests. “Every city has a right to an international art fair, he said, so it was time Hong Kong caught up. It just did not happen any earlier. The main sponsor is Lehman Brothers, the investment bank whose name is associated with the Lehman collection at the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York, and the Neuberger Museum at the State University of New York and who has a long history of arts philanthropy and its own corporate collection. “The fair will bring enormous vitality to the arts in Hong Kong and the region,” said Lehman’s Managing Director Francine Kitteridge. “We feel we’ve gotten very good value for our investment.” For Jesse Bhattal, CEO of Lehman Brothers Asia Pacific, the sponsorship perfectly suits the firm since Asia already accounts for over 50% of its current income and he expects most of its future growth to come from the region.
As far as big international art fairs, go, however, this one was still quite moderate in size compared to some of the big European fairs, but according to Renfrew there was a conscious decision to keep it small but of top quality the first time out. “The art world is closely monitoring this event” to see what happens, he said. Some top-notch galleries in both Asia and the U.S. preferred to sit this one out but their representatives were seen taking careful notes and they apparently liked what they saw. There was some concern beforehand that perhaps public interest and attendance would not be up to snuff, but by the end of the fours days more than 19,000 admissions were recorded, a third higher than the original projections. Such a figure and a number of top level sales that took place ensure this will be an annual event. “This is already the best, most important contemporary art fair in Asia,” enthused Meg Maggio, director of Pékin Fine Arts in Beijing and a dealer with over twenty years of experience. “Hong Kong just has all the right ingredients,” she said. “It has the infrastructure, experience, and knowledge necessary to run an international art fair. The hardware (the space) and the software (management expertise) are all in place.” She said contemporary art fairs in the mainland were much different, more “cutting edge young things.” This one, however, has
“raised the bar,” she said, with the presence of world famous galleries such as Marlborough Fine Art (with venues in North and South America and Europe), Yvon Lambert (Paris and New York) and Eva Presenhuber (Zurich). According to Maggio, Hong Kong is a much better place than Tokyo for such a fair because the fair there has an absolute limit to its exhibition space and can not expand. In Hong Kong, however, there is no reason for the fair not to get bigger and better. Less than one fifth of the available exhibition space of the Hong Kong Convention and Exhibition Centre was used for the current installment. “So the ability to expand is enormous,” she emphasized.
Others were a little more reluctant to declare Hong Kong completely ready to be a new global hub for contemporary art, alongside London and New York, which was one of the stated goals of the fair. Macau’s own Kontantin Bessmertny, one of Macau’s most widely recognized artists, was enthusiastic about the fair and its location in Hong Kong, which he feels has much more potential as an art market than a place like Shanghai, since Hong Kong is much more international. “It will be a big art melting pot,” he said. But he added that it was not happening yet and predicted that it would take “five to ten years to really develop.” “If you have good things to show sooner or later people will appreciate it,” he said. “But people do not yet believe in Hong Kong as an art market,” he cautioned. “It is a very recent thing for Hong Kong to have an international art profile”. The problem, he noted, is that “Hong Kong is used to measuring everything by the Hong Kong dollar per square inch and many people don’t value art.”
His sentiments were echoed by his Hong Kong dealer, Amelia Johnson, who felt that “art is not always taken seriously” in Hong Kong, where she reckoned that, despite the passionate commitment of many, there are still no full-time artists. “All have day jobs,” she wryly declared. But she did express hope that the fair will “open up doors to the full spectrum of art appreciation in Hong Kong” which is still somewhat lacking. “You should be able to see exhibitions of this quality in Hong Kong art museums but unfortunately it is just not happening,” she said. Even Renfrew admitted that more work needed to be done to engage the local population though education and outreach programs, such as the free tickets to art students, seminars for first-time buyers, and introductory talks in both English and Cantonese organized by his management team.
There is no doubt, however, that the current moment is about riding a tide of popular trend-setting awareness of Chinese contemporary art that reaches far beyond the region. As Philip Dodd, former director of the Institute of Contemporary Arts in London noted, recent years have seen a dramatic attention-grabbing transformation from “Made in China” to “Created in China” and from “China Cheap” to “China Chic”. Hong Kong’s traditional role as a willing and able negotiator between the West and China, in terms of both production and consumption, certainly now seems poised to move and make a difference. But what should belong to art and what to mammon, and what is the proper balance between them? These remain open questions.
Such concerns were brought to the surface at an international conference organized by Hong Kong’s Asia Art Archive held at the fair. Entitled “SHIFTING SITES: Cultural Desire and the Museum” this event convened an international panel of museum experts and arts advisors who were asked to share their own experiences and give some advice on planning directions for the new West Kowloon Arts District project. Joseph Thompson, Founding Director of the Massachusetts Museum of Contemporary Art and Sheena Wagstaff, Chief Curator of the Tate
Modern, spoke eloquently of what they thought they had done – and were doing – to make their museums popular and money making, with programs widely embraced by the public. “An open platform for flexible events – not a box for objects” was the gist of Thompson’s advice, and Wagstaff emphasized the public accessibility of the Tate Modern’s vast Turbine Hall, which has been the site of many extremely popular temporary installations. Both of their institutions have enjoyed attendance figures and ticket sales well beyond expectations and both have transformed the economies and environments of the neighbourhoods in which they are located.
But at the same conference David Elliott, former director of a number of European museums, sounded a different note. He warned that there is an erosion of the idea of public value and public space that is currently taking place on a global scale, and arts organizations are not exempt. He harshly reminded the crowd that so many popular brand-name museums seem to be serving commerce more than art, and emphasized that “a museum is not a business.” There must be room for public places that do not necessarily make money. “In places like Hong Kong the idea of a public domain hardly exists,” he said, and he warned Hong Kong to think very carefully about what it did with the West Kowloon project – a rare instance of a newly created public space. China itself, he advised, “should really slow down and ask all the right questions before it builds any more museums.” This line of thinking was reiterated by Oscar Ho, a member of the Museum Advisory Board of the West Kowloon project, who underscored that “in Hong Kong we measure everything by economic result. It’s time we changed that mindset.” The new project, he said, “is a matter of identity – who we are and how we want to present ourselves to the world”. By the end of the discussion, panelists and audience were left with the mantra of businessman, collector, and honorary fair patron David Tang ringing in their ears: “We have a critical need to be intellectually ambitious” in any plans to promote the arts in Hong Kong.
Measured solely by the standards of commerce, however, Art HK 08 did quite well. The top price paid at the fair was US$1.5 million for “Untitled,” by Yue Min Jun, sold by Gana Art of Seoul, and prices in the US$300,000 range for works by Yan Peiming, Xu Bing, and Ugo Rondinone, were achieved by galleries from Hong Kong, London and Zurich, respectively. A work by Cai Guo Qiang, creator of the opening ceremonies of the Beijing Olympics and currently the subject of a major retrospective at New York’s Guggenheim museum, sold for US$260,000 within fifteen minutes of the opening of the fair by 10 Chancery Lane Gallery, Hong Kong; and three other galleries – from the Philippines, Pakistan, and Hong Kong – sold out everything they brought with them.
Whether or not the fair has indeed raised “the cultural temperature of Hong Kong” as was David Tang’s hope remains to be seen, but, according to Hong Kong dealer Katie de Tilly, the success of this first installment means that it “looks set to become a key fixture on the art fair circuit” with the potential to become a major fair in the international calendar. As Charles Merewether put it: “The success of ART HK 08 confirms the good health of the international art market. It is a timely event, capitalizing on the shifting dynamics of the art world and the level of sales and quality of attendance is testimony to the fact that Hong Kong is the place in Asia to stage an international art fair of this caliber.” See you next year.
Peter Zabielskis teaches cultural anthropology, including
the anthropology of art, at the University of Macau.
