New Shanghai Fair Shows PotentialBy Amy Page
Published: October 24, 2007
 
Courtesy Shanghai Fine Jewellery and Art Fair
Shanghai Exhibition Center at night
SFJAF was organized by Maximin Berko, who has lived in Shanghai for six years and whose parents own Berko Fine Painting in Brussels, and Nicolo Mori, an international businessman who has long worked with China. Like ShContemporary, the fair was held in the Shanghai Exhibition Center, a Cold War-style complex built as a Sino-Soviet Friendship Hall in 1955. Thirty-five intrepid dealers signed up, most from Belgium and France. Heike Grossman, the director of Galerie Thomas in Munich, said she liked the idea of participating in the first fair of Western art and antiques in China and introducing Chinese buyers to Western art. Some of the exhibitors, though, already had clients from China. Bernard Dulon, a Paris dealer in tribal art, said that he had two, one in Shanghai and one in Hong Kong. The fair, he said, was the first time African art has been shown in China. The Brussels dealer Gisele Croes, a major market insider in Chinese art who has sold to the Shanghai Museum, bought late pieces that ranged in price from €45,000 ($65,000) to €1 million ($1.42 million) and were certain to appeal to the Chinese taste, such as a large enameled Qing gu (vase). Croes said that art fairs had not been sufficiently explained to the Chinese. One visitor, for example, asked why Croes didn’t just sell the objects at auction. Jewelry dealer David Morris said that his Chinese clients were “very surprised” to learn that the pieces in the booths were for sale. Several of the antiques dealers were disconcerted by the number of people who were taking detailed photographs of the pieces, fearing they would be used to copy them. Robert Boghossian, owner of Aviva gallery in Geneva, which specializes in high-end jewelry, bought some stunning pieces, including a necklace of perfectly matched jadeite beads, each measuring 12 to 15.8 millimeters, that carried a seven-figure price. He was one of seven jewelry dealers at the fair. Kristian Stahl, of Stahl Bespoke Jewels of Stockholm, who was catalogued in the jewelry section but is really in a class by himself, brought one item: a set of gaming pieces made of synthetic corundum (sapphire) and edged with diamonds, rubies, and emeralds. The pieces, which are made to order and sold in a limited edition, are priced around “several millions of euros,” said Stahl, depending on which stones are used. “I launched the set four days ago,” he said on the first day of the fair. “Yesterday 100 people knew about them; now 500 people know.” By the Monday after the opening weekend some significant sales had been made. Berko sold two 19th-century paintings to a local buyer: Franz Verhas’s The Little Rascal and Jan Bertou’s The Model, at €150,000 for the pair. Bernard de Leye, an antiques dealer from Brussels, said that an 18-karat-gold-and-enameled necklace made for 19th-century French king Louis Philippe, who gave it to his son, the Duke of Nemours, was reserved by a Chinese buyer. It carried a price tag of €180,000. Ravenscourt Galleries of London and Moscow sold a 1926 oil painting on panel by Albert Marquet for €150,000. Opera Gallery, an international gallery based in Paris, had success with two Andy Warhol serigraphs of Marilyn Monroe: a brown and pink one was sold and a black and silver version was reserved. How many exhibitors will return to the fair next year and how many new ones will sign up remains to be seen. The organizers, however, are firmly committed to 2008 and have already signed the rental contract for the exhibition center. |
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