What is driving China’s stupendous artistic surge?

The sudden surge in Chinese collecting is not merely a reflection of rising prosperity, experts feel, but also a sub-conscious reaction to the repressive Mao years during which the country was deprived of culture.

For the countrymen, who watched art made out as a frivolous exercise except while put to didactic use, the new-found freedom to explore pure aesthetic pleasures, to repossess historical artworks and to flaunt recent affluence has indeed been a liberating experience!

In some ways, the tide of art buying is an effort to make up for lost time. “For 5 or 6 decades, nothing happened in China,” observes the Asia Society president, Vishakha N. Desai, “That’s a big break! The last two and a half centuries were those of humiliation. They now feel an obligation to prize art again.” So they are placing their bets primarily on the art of their homeland.

No surprise, much of the Chinese artworks of the last many decades respond sometimes more subtly, sometimes more directly -to the regulation of artistic expression by the country’s leadership. From calligraphy to gunpowder, Chinese artists have a wealth of cultural elements untouched by Western artists to bank on. The socio-political challenges they face in their homeland has helped shape powerful, iconoclastic pieces, which can very well hold their own against more famous contemporary Western art.

Underlining the trend, Colin Gleadell of The Telegraph UK mentions in an elaborate essay: “Since China entered the WTO, its art market has grown at a staggering rate. It rose by 200 percent to some £2.1 billion per annum between 2004 and 2009, overtaking even France. Add the Hong Kong sales and there is a combined auction turnover of £3.6 billion, which is 14 percent of the global art market.

"During the global financial crisis of 2008-09, mainland Chinese buyers emerged as a dominant force. While America’s wealthiest lost 20 percent of their cumulative wealth, China’s increased theirs by 84 percent. Currently, there are more billionaires in China than in any other country, apart from America, and art is just one of the commodities they are looking to invest in...”