The Chinese art market's headlong growth over the past few years, propelling it to become the world's second largest as of this month, has left some awaiting what seems an inevitable bursting of the bubble. The emergence of China as a pioneer of the art stock exchange — a new mode of investment that is beginning to pop up around the globe, to various degrees of success — has only led to greater worries of unsustainability. Now, Reuters reports that the country's Tianjin Cultural Artwork Exchange, which was launched in January, has brought trade on its two top artworks to a grinding halt, fearing that runaway over-evaluation that caused shares to rocket to 1,700 percent would endanger investors. 

Two months ago, the Tianjin exchange — which offers investors fractional ownership of works — listed shares in two Chinese paintings, "Roaring Yellow River" by modern Chinese painter Bai Gengyan and "Autumn in Fortress." After the surge of investment in the works, shares in "Roaring Yellow River" jumped to 17.2 yuan ($2.62) from their issue price of 1 yuan, valuing the work at 103 million yuan ($15.7 million) — around 52 times higher than the top price achieved at auction by the painter.

According to Reuters, however, dramatic swings in asset prices are nothing new in China, where investment frenzies occur for items as diverse as mung beans to ant-based aphrodisiacs in recent years — a fact that perhaps influenced the Tianjin exchange's decision to list seven new paintings and a diamond on their site last week. But another art exchange in China, the Shenzhen Cultural Assets and Equity Exchange, is even less diversified,
exclusively selling shares in paintings by contemporary artist Yang Peijiang,  

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The phenomenon of companies looking to present art as an investment vehicle is still fledgling, with many detractors decrying it as unstable and shady. The London-based Artistic Investment
Advisers firm, which called itself the world's first "art hedge
fund," folded in 2009 after two years of operation. Perhaps the most prominent example of such investment schemes, however, is the Paris-based Art Exchange, which was billed as "the first financial marketplace for artworks" when A&F Markets unveiled it  in January, under the leadership of the 26-year old Pierre Naquin. New York dealer Christophe van de Weghe told ARTINFO's Judd Tully, in an article that appeared in the March 2011 issue of Art+Auction, that Naquin's exchange was "a dumb idea," adding that "their target is people who don't know anything about art and who think of the art world as fancy, exotic, and fun."

"Not everyone agrees with what we're doing and we understand that," Naquin told ARTINFO France in January. "They're afraid that afterward people will consider art as having an index — art went up today, art went down today." He then went on to predict that in the art investment market, "price evolution will be more moderate — minimal in relation to the 100, 200, or 500 percent increases for works that only come up for auction every five or ten years." In China, however, this has clearly not been the case.