NEW YORK—If this year’s Asian Contemporary Art Fair has a catch phrase thus far, it would have to be “a lot of interest.” That’s the long and short of what most gallerists had to report when ARTINFO visited the second-year fair this morning. Wandering the spacious aisles and 60-some booths at the polished fair, housed at Pier 92 at 52nd St., there was a lot of great art to be seen but, perhaps predictably, not a lot of visitors.

According to a spokeswoman for the fair, which runs through Monday, November 10, last night’s preview was “mobbed,” although one gallerist offered a slightly less enthusiastic take: “Last year it was packed at the preview — not quite like a Friday at Macy’s, but almost; this year it was crowded but not packed.” Regardless of semantics, people did attend. But rather than buying, it seems they mostly discussed artworks and did their research.

At New York and Beijing’s Chambers Fine Art, Manila’s Silverlens Gallery, Beijing’s Red Gate Gallery, and Madrid’s Galeria Dolores de Sierra, there were no sales to report. Other gallerists were a bit vague in their characterizations of last night’s activity, with Mona Hauser of Dubai’s XVA Gallery telling ARTINFO the preview yielded “a lot of strong nibbles” and Rebecca Heidenberg of New York–based Lillian Heidenberg Fine Art only offering that the gallery “has some things in the works.”

Laure Raibaut from the New York–, London- and Beijing-based Chinese Contemporary said she was “happily surprised” with the turnout at the preview and that a number of items had been placed on reserve at the gallery’s booth, including a haunting Zhang Dali acrylic-on-vinyl painting for $45,000, which shows the face of a Chinese man created from the phrase “AK-47” painted repeatedly in lines across the canvas in varying shades of white and gray. Next to the painting in the booth’s corner was a chalky, pink naked man hanging upside down with his eyes closed — another Zhang piece, Chinese Offspring. The sculpture, which is part of the Saatchi Collection, is a resin cast of a Chinese migrant worker. The work is available for $23,000.

The first gallery to report actual sales was Beijing’s one-year-old Ullens Center for Contemporary Art, which was offering only limited editions. Two works by Zhang Xiaogang, including the characteristic Big Family Portrait, had gone for $7,300 each, and Great Criticism Series – Pepsi, a witty mingling of Maoist propaganda art and American commercialism by Wang Guangyi, had sold for $5,840. Many visitors had also expressed interest in Yan Lei’s sculpture Dog Year, on offer for $7,300, which depicts colorful little Chinese dogs holding up a bull meant to represent Wall St. In an artistic act of almost eerie premonition, the work was made last year, well before China’s major investment in American debt.

Xerxes Fine Arts, of London, also reported sales. A first-timer at the fair and one of three galleries showing Middle Eastern artists (a category new to the fair this year), Xerxes sold works by Iranian artists Jamshid Bayrami, Seifollah Samadian, Mehdi Saeedi, and Hossein Khosrojerdi, priced between $5,000 and $20,000. The gallery had already taken down the sold pieces and replaced them with others, but still available was Bayrami’s The Iranians, a thought-provoking photo on canvas showing a gathering of women in burkas sitting on a giant red carpet. Covered in their long veils and shot from above, the women almost become abstractions, part of the design of the carpet. The work was priced at $15,000.

On the larger subject of the economy and its effect on the art market, gallerists' reactions ranged from reticence to honesty. Sentiments were generally twofold: According to Xerxes’s Ali Bagherzadeh, the “economic crisis has been a catalyst for readjustment of prices,” an observation affirmed by Laure Raibaut at Chinese Contemporary, who pointed out a sculpture in her booth whose price she had reduced from $25,000 to $12,000. At the same time, insiders agreed that New York has been the hardest hit, with some foreign markets feeling little difference, and some, such as that in the Philippines, actually picking up, according to Silverlens gallerist and artist Isa Lorenzo.