Debut Hong Kong Fair Makes Its Mark

HONG KONG—The inaugural edition of the Hong Kong International Art Fair, also called ART HK 08, marked a high point in the city’s increasingly important spring sales season, coming after the blockbuster Sotheby’s auctions in early April and just days before the gavel falls at Christie’s on May 24. Thanks to participation by some of the biggest art dealers locally and internationally, noteworthy sales, and enthusiastic attendance by the general public, the fair, which took place at the Hong Kong Convention and Exhibition Centre May 14–18, strengthened the former British territory’s claim on a position in the global art market.

ART HK 08 bills itself as “the first truly international art fair to be staged in Hong Kong,” but this is by no means the city’s first attempt at creating such an event. The rival Art and Antiques International Fair, which also includes contemporary art, has been held for the past three years around the time of the fall auctions, and during the financial bubble before 1997 (when the territory reverted to mainland rule), there was another big annual art fair offering a slew of not only Chinese but also big-name international contemporary painters.

Operated by London’s Asian Art Fairs and directed by Bonhams contemporary art specialist Magnus Renfrew, ART HK 08 focused on contemporary work from around the world, with over a hundred international exhibitors showcasing a range of paintings, photography, sculpture, prints, jewelry, and installations. Organizers reported that the five-day fair drew 19,185 visitors, a third more than anticipated, and while reliable projections for total sales have not yet been released, Natasha Cubitt, ART HK 08’s marketing director, said: “Generally sales at the fair were very strong and the galleries were happy with the level of collectors internationally and new buyers from Hong Kong.”

Trade at the fair’s May 14 preview was particularly enthusiastic: Within 15 minutes of the doors opening, Hong Kong’s 10 Chancery Lane Gallery had sold Gunpowderbook, a 1991 work by Cai Guo-Qiang, an artist currently exhibiting at the Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum in New York, for $260,000 to an “international” collector who lives in Hong Kong part of the year. By the half-hour mark, Grotto Fine Arts, a local gallery that specializes in Hong Kong artists, sold all four of its fine brush works by Wilson Shieh, one of the most successful young painters in the city, at prices up to $23,000.

The most expensive disclosed transaction at the fair was a large untitled oil on canvas painted in 2000 by China’s Yue Minjun, which Seoul’s Gana Art Gallery sold to a South Korean collector for $1.5 million. Other top reported sales were Yan Peiming’s Portrait du Timonier No. 7 (1998), which went for $380,000 at Hong Kong’s Art Beatus, and Three Quotations from Chairman Mao, a 2007 work from Xu Bing’s “Square Word Calligraphy” series, which brought $350,000 at London’s Albion. The identity of the buyers in the latter two cases were not released.

If the highest numbers were achieved by Chinese artists, it may be because they were strongly represented by dealers, including many of those from outside of Asia. This was understandable in the case of the London branch of Marlborough gallery, which devoted several walls of its booth to paintings by the late Chen Yifei, the Shanghainese realism master whom the gallery championed in the 1990s, a generation before the current Chinese contemporary art boom.

However, in a market with easy and regular access to mainland works, the tendency of dealers with much broader inventories of world-class art to cater to what could be perceived as “local” tastes seemed odd and ill-conceived. Several Western galleries gave prime space to Andy Warhol’s Mao Zedong–themed pieces, for example, which did not particularly generate much excitement.

Of the four booths at the fair that completely sold out, three offered non-Chinese art, signaling an interest in variety. Manila's The Drawing Room did well with its large-scale and impact-making pieces by up-and-coming artists from the Philippines. The other two exhibitors specialized in art from the subcontinent: Pakistan’s Gandhara Art and a joint effort by Mumbai galleries Chemould Prescott Road and Chatterjee & Lal, which devoted their space to Pakistani artist Rashid Rana, notably his images in which small photographs of slaughtered animals are arranged in a collage pattern meant to evoke classic carpet designs. Rana’s pictures were a favorite among the snap-happy teenagers visiting the fair.