SHANGHAI—Last year was a busy one for Artcurial. The Paris-based auction house not only realized sales of €125 million ($168 million), a sum surpassed in France only by Christie’s, but it also founded, in conjunction with the Aga Khan, the Arqana horse-sale firm in Deauville and launched, with media mogul Bruno Wu, Artcurial China in Shanghai—the first foreign auction house on the Chinese mainland.

The man behind this whirlwind expansion is Nicolas Orlowski, the 44-year-old entrepreneur who in 1999 bought Artcurial, then just an art gallery and bookshop. He transformed it into an auction house in partnership with Drouot auctioneer Francis Briest and installed it on the Champs-Élysées in the neo-Rococo Hôtel Dassault, where Orlowski owns the lease and formerly staged antiques fairs.

Orlowski says he is happy with a background role as Artcurial’s CEO, behind cochairmen Briest and François Tajan. His 2008 focus is firmly on China, where the debut sale in January, featuring 71 lots of Chinese art, made ¥60 million, or $8.3 million (est. ¥40–54 million; $5.5–7.4 million). Now Orlowski wants biannual auction sessions there—including sales of watches, jewelry and Western art—and plans to buy one of Shanghai’s top two extant auction firms, with the aim of making Artcurial the city’s most successful house by 2010. “There’s lots of politics and red tape in China,” he says, “but also lots of money. The Chinese auction market is on the verge of great things.”

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