SHANGHAI—Despite the extraordinary attention given to the explosion of the Chinese contemporary art market in the past few years, observers have only recently begun to investigate what Chinese collectors theselves are buying. The perception has long been that the growing popularity of Chinese art was due primarily to Western buyers and interest. But since an anonymous Chinese collector paid a record $2.7 million for the Liu Xiaodong painting New Three Gorges Resettlers at a Beijing Poly auction last year, focus has started to shift to what Chinese buyers are interested in.

Some market watchers saw September’s ShContemporary fair in Shanghai as evidence of this new interest, though the fair organizers always emphasized that they were reaching out to a general Asian audience rather than a specifically Chinese one. Now, Shanghai’s Zendai Museum of Modern Art is taking a major step in reaching out specifically to local Chinese collectors by organizing a special trip for a select group to Art Basel Miami Beach in December. While this isn’t the first time that a trip like this has been taken—the late Jonathan Napack, formerly Art Basel’s Asia Art adviser, organized a similar excursion to Basel last year for a very small group including Zendai founder Dai Zhitong, who in the end couldn’t secure a visa—the fact that it is put together by a local entity indicates that the Chinese are starting to play a more active role in educating themselves about the market.

But exactly how interested are the Chinese in non-Chinese art? While Chinese buyers are showing up more and more on the auction circuit, as evidenced by Christie’s record-breaking sales of $68 million last fall in Hong Kong, they have mostly made waves buying Chinese art, whether antiquities or modern and contemporary. And even in those areas, they are still far from a major presence. When the Shanghai Gallery of Art first opened in 2004, the space actively courted a Chinese audience, and a majority of their buyers were Chinese (both mainland and Taiwanese). However, “when the gallery started focusing on installation and more experimental works,” says David Chan, SGA’s new director, “our client base broadened to a more international audience. Furthermore, we saw that many Chinese buyers were developers or executives from large corporations” rather than private buyers. Indeed, Zendai MoMA’s Dai is a real estate developer, and the museum and its collection are only part of a larger plan for his development in the city’s Pudong district, which also includes a mall, an art hotel, and residences.

Another problem is that many Chinese buyers have yet to develop a curatorial sense. “It is difficult for Chinese collectors to have a vision for their collection,” says Wu Yinchang, founder of Shine Art Space in Shanghai and one of only four people to participate in Napack’s trip. “The Chinese are just not as sophisticated as their Western counterparts. Given a few years, they will have educated themselves enough. But generally, they start with what they know and slowly work from there.”

And what Chinese collectors know at the moment is Chinese contemporary and modern; very few are interested in, or even familiar with, Western contemporary art. Wu, who started collecting Western modern art in the late 1980s and moved on to Chinese art in the mid-’90s, claims that his gallery’s client base is split evenly between Westerners and Chinese, but admits that most of his Chinese clients are based in Taiwan, Hong Kong, and other parts of Asia, with a smaller percentage from the mainland. Furthermore, he says that many Chinese collectors, particularly those from the mainland, are currently priced out of the market, as it is difficult for them to justify paying millions of dollars for a contemporary piece.