In the Name of the Father

HONG KONG—In 1994, Swiss-born Hong Kong–based gallerist Manfred Schoeni staged an exhibition of Chinese avant-garde artist Yue Minjin’s pictures, which are memorable for the exaggerated open-mouthed grins of their subjects. This past October, 13 years later, Sotheby’s London sold Yue’s Execution of Maximilian, a satirical nod to both the Tiananmen Square confrontation and Manet’s painting of the same title, for £2.9 million ($5.9 million), setting a (since eclipsed) record for a contemporary Chinese painting. Yue is just one of many celebrated figures in the field presciently championed by Schoeni. After the gallerist died, in 2004, his daughter Nicole took the helm of the family business, and she recently paid tribute to her father’s legacy with a 15th-anniversary show, “RE-collection,” held November 24 through December 11 in the gallery’s newly renovated 3,500-square-foot space on Old Bailey Street. On view were works by 41 contemporary Chinese artists, 10 of them—including Guizhou Province-born Chen Yu, who is known for his mocking, politically charged canvases—exclusively represented by Schoeni. The exhibition drew much buzz and business: About 75 percent of the 42 works, priced from HK $80,000 to HK $12 million ($10,300–1.5 million), were bought by the largely European clientele. Attendees at the opening ranged from movie mogul Harvey Weinstein, a new collector of Chinese contemporary art and a friend of Nicole’s, to a handful of representatives from Sotheby’s. “We had 450 people in two hours”, Nicole says, noting that traffic remained steady throughout the run, with about a dozen people coming to browse each day. She is too discreet to name names, but she will say that Howard Bilton, the founder of the Hong Kong–based Sovereign Art Fund, laid out HK $220,000 ($28,200) for Fist Power Series No. 11C, by emerging artist Zhao Fang, whom Nicole personally brought to the gallery and whose name will no doubt be on everyone’s lips before long.

"In the Name of the Father" originally appeared in the February 2008 issue of Art+Auction. For a complete list of articles from this issue available on ARTINFO, see Art+Auction's February 2008 Table of Contents.