“Financial” has a married-with-kids rhyme with the words “turmoil”, “crisis”, “crunch” and other painful terms these days. I know, it doesn’t even rhyme. But what seems forced a few months ago appears easy as a Hawaiian breeze these days.
This uncomfortable breeze has fluttered its way to Asia, in the art corner of things.
In Reuter’s recent article (see below) , the ‘red-hot’ Chinese contemporary art markets seems to have cooled off somewhat, as bidders are shuddering from sub-zero temperatures rendered by the economic crisis.
Global financial turmoil was fingered the culprit for Sotheby’s poor showing at Hong Kong’s marquee autumn sale of Asian contemporary artwork. Shame-faced and in hiding, Financial Crisis nodded to its distant cousin – the Excess of Identity in Late-Stage Capitalism.
Proud representative of one of Asia’s rising identity incursions into the new world (order), perhaps all the attention on Chinese contemporary art has sort of made it out to be more ballooned up than it was intended to be.
Kind of like a shy child given too much exam stress. Buckles under pressure.
No longer a dumb comrade, Chinese contemporary art has taken on the veneer of East-meets-West, I-don’t-care-what-identity-you-canvas-cos-I-have-my-hybrid-own sensibility.
Yes, I have a voice. But what happens what late-stage capitalism catches up with art?
It has a price tag, its highs and lows, its place in the market. What happens after it’s dropped off unceremoniously from the good books of Big Brother?
People have short attention spans. Public memory is kind of taxed. Late-stage capitalism favours the excessive.
Put a price tag to art, you have an auction buyers and sellers.
Slap a price tag on identity, you get more than you bargained for. Too much. An excess of identity – bursting-at-the-seams identity, you don’t know what the price is any more.
It’s like a grotesque Frankenstein mish-mashing various nightmares into one ghoulish body.
Rather like that anime Paprika I saw recently, where people venture into each other’s – and eventual the general public’s – dreams. There was this festive parade of nightmare-bodies thrown together, and the moving mound of pulsating lives pushed on as it swallowed even more poeple-in-dreams.
What troubled me was this – these dreams eventually ate into (and ate up) reality.
Kind of like marrying a neo-Asian identity with consumer culture.
(Written in 'Writing for Online' course @ Amara)
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FROM REUTERS LAST OCTOBER:
HONG KONG (Reuters) - Global financial turmoil has caught up with the red-hot Chinese contemporary art market as bidders failed to buy top-flight paintings at a major Sotheby’s auction in Hong Kong on Saturday.
For the past few years, auction rooms in London, New York and Hong Kong have crackled with fierce interest in Chinese contemporary paintings as prices broke record after record.
But in Sotheby’s marquee autumn sale of Asian contemporary artwork, a key twice-yearly barometer of market sentiment among the world’s top collectors, 19 of 47 prominent works went unsold and others barely hit low estimates.
"The results weren’t at all ideal, and prices of contemporary Chinese art seem to have reached a peak now," Jackson See, a Singaporean buyer, told Reuters in the packed auction hall.
"It is showing signs of a real correction," he added.
Works by feted artists Zhang Xiaogang, Yue Minjun, Liu Wei, Liao Jichun and Zeng Fanzhi failed to sell with Zeng’s "After the Long March Andy Warhol arrived in China," for instance, attracting bids far short of its HK$20 million reserve price.
Sotheby’s said that after 5 years of "unprecedented growth" the poor showing was to be expected.
"It is not surprising that there will be some leveling off, which is what we also experienced this evening, in addition to some estimates which were overly optimistic," said Evelyn Lin, the Head of Sotheby’s Contemporary Asian Art department.
