A week of close-to-OD art happenings in town. ArtHK 11 is bigger but not necessarily better - too eager to be international? Good for exposure, dialogues, etc., but if we cant even find Asian art in Asia, where's one supposed to find them? That said, upstairs Art Futures is a great attempt and had some real surprises. Christies has a blow-out sale, unsurprisingly. Evening Sale's proceed exceeded estimates of all 3 events combined (does that mean: auction house shouldnt bother with 'low-price' art?!) Interesting to see conceptual artists like Qiu Zhijie, Xu Bing, Huang Yongping doing well. These lots are all from the John Bransten collection. I can already see the post-auction report from Christies..."provenance, art historic value...still matter". Or really blindingly obvious statements like that.
From personal viewpoint, leaving the auction empty handed is a bit disappointing. Many estimates seem attractive - hence I guess, unrealistic to start with? The QZJ '1000 times' is great - cant believe it blew the estimate of HKD30-50k all the way to HKD1.8m though?! (shouldnt there be a penalty when the auction house missed their estimate by so much?) HYP was close to 10x too. Sui Jiangguo had a good, highly political piece, and went for a 'reasonable sum' of HKD200k. The Zeng Fanzhi Warhol is one of the worst I have seen from his series - and it doubled the estimate to reach HKD 8m, all for a horrible piece. F2 tried to sell its ZFZ portrait of a girl for HKD 3.5m. That felt like a bargain now?
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