>How would they rate China? I keep hearing that their banks are
>heavily exposed to a leveraged real estate boom.
Here's an interesting puzzle piece. Two of the top 5 and three of the top 10 new personal auction records in 2010 for contemporary artists were set in Hong Kong.
It's this kind of thing that worries me about Jeffrey Deitch coming to run MOCA in Los Angeles. He knows art, but he won his spurs as an employee of Citibank advising big-spending, art-buying Citibank clients on what was hot and what was not. The art market looks more and more like the stock market every day.
A few years ago Calvin Tompkins asked a big art buyer, I forget the name right now, if he thought that contemporary art was worth what people were paying for it. The guy said, "but I was going to ask you that."
http://www.artmarketinsight.com/wallet/amidetails/showweb/1308
CHEN Yifei is in second place with String Quartet that fetched ten times its pre-sale estimate at $6.9m on 29 May at Christie's in Hong Kong, the best hammer price at Christie's 20th Century Contemporary Asian and Chinese Art sale, and $1.6m better than his previous record.
In 5th place, SHI Chong whose Landscape of Today sold for a new personal record of $3.4 m on 15 May at China Guardian Auctions Co., Ltd., beating his previous record by $1m (Contemporary Scenery, $1.9m on 31 May 2007 at Poly International Auction Co., Ltd.).
In 7th place, LIU Ye whose painting Bright Road sold for the equivalent of $2.1m at Sotheby's Hong Kong, adding more than $0.7m to his previous personal best in 2008.
High flying capital has been fueling the art market with a vengeance since Japanese buyers started shopping in New York in the '80s. The bottom dropped out of that market after Japan went bust.