Now China is also a mad success at manufacturing contemporary art

Chinese Art Is as Hot in the East as It Is in the West – by DAVID BARBOZA/NY Times

SHANGHAI — With prices for Chinese contemporary art soaring, Christie’s opened its week of art auctions in Hong Kong by realizing a record-breaking $67.9 million in its sales of Asian contemporary and Chinese 20th-century art.

Wealthy buyers from China and other parts of Asia are now jockeying with European and American collectors to buy Chinese works that only five years ago were largely ignored by the international art market.

A 1920s work by Xu Beihong, one of China’s best-known early-20th-century painters, sold at Christie’s on Sunday for $7 million, a record price for any Chinese painting. Titled “Slave and Lion,” it is a Western-style oil painting that depicts a scene from a story set in the Roman Empire.

Even more startling were the prices paid for works by living Chinese artists, especially the painters and installation artists who began working in the 1980s, including Wang Guangyi, Zhang Xiaogang, Yue Minjun, Zeng Fanzhi, Cai Guoqiang and Liu Xiaodong. A few years ago their works could be had for $30,000 or less.

Today there are waiting lists several years long, and the Christie’s auction was simply the latest showcase for the bidding wars these artists inspire. “Tiananmen Square,” for example, a 1993 work by Zhang Xiaogang, sold for just over $2.3 million, a record for the artist. Sketched in bright yellow and bluish gray, the painting is empty of human life; yet delicate red lines in the foreground hint at the 1989 Tiananmen Square massacre.

Mr. Zhang, 48, who is best known for a series of family portraits set during the Cultural Revolution, is perhaps the most sought-after artist in China. His “Bloodline Series: Comrade No. 120,” a smaller work, sold for $979,200 in March at Sotheby’s New York, surprising the auction world.

But on Sunday, in addition to his record-setting sale, another work of his sold for $1.9 million, and two paintings each fetched close to $1 million. Christie’s called the $2.3 million price for “Tiananmen Square” the highest paid in the international auction market for an oil painting by a living Chinese experimental artist.

But last week at the Beijing Poly Auction, a painting by the Beijing artist Liu Xiaodong sold for more than $2.7 million. The huge panorama, approximately 32 by 9_ feet, titled “Newly Displaced Population” and depicting the Three Gorges Dam construction site, was acquired by a Chinese restaurant owner.

The Christie’s auction in Hong Kong set records for several other Chinese artists, including Yue Minjun, famous for his portraits of Chinese men, looking very much like himself, in fits of delirious laughter. His “Kites” sold for $962,000. Zeng Fanzhi’s “Mask 1999, No. 3,” part of a series of people wearing white masks, sold for a record $816,400.

The growing demand for Chinese contemporary art has contributed to the building boom here and in Beijing, where new art galleries and exhibition spaces open virtually every week. Some in the art world here are beginning to talk about a bubble.