US art dealers make London scene a battleground

New York galleries are moving to the capital to attract business from wealthy 'non-doms' bringing a more corporate edge to the market

  Pace gallery opened a new space in London recently. 

 London's art scene is becoming a "battleground", with major US galleries opening new and bigger spaces in the city as they vie to attract the capital's growing numbers of ultra-rich "non-doms".

Art experts said the arrival and expansion of four New York galleries in London ahead of the Frieze Art Fair, which opens on Thursday, reflects the competition at the top end of the art market, with American dealers needing to move here to gain business from wealthy Russian, Asian and Middle Eastern collectors.

The Manhattan dealer David Zwirner, whose eponymous gallery represents 40 artists, including Dan Flavin and Thomas Ruff, has now opened a 10,000 sq ft gallery in a Georgian townhouse in Grafton Street, Mayfair, its first outside the US.

Pace gallery, which represents 70 artists, including the estate of Mark Rothko, has opened a second, 9,000 sq ft London space in the Royal Academy's 6 Burlington Gardens, in addition to its existing outpost in Soho.
Skarstedt Gallery, which has artists including George Condo and Keith Haring, will open a 2,500 sq ft space on Old Bond Street on Wednesday.

The Michael Werner gallery, which represents artists including Georg Baselitz and Peter Doig, opened last month on two floors of a Mayfair townhouse in Upper Brook Street. Its London director, Kadee Robbins, said the move reflected that the capital has "a very wealthy, very savvy international community" of collectors.

As the gallerists feared in 2010, when Pace announced its intention to expand into London and Hauser & Wirth opened a new gallery in Savile Row, the established London galleries selling contemporary art now face a big challenge from foreign rivals on their own doorstep.

Judd Tully, a New York-based writer for Art+Auction magazine, said: "Essentially, what the richer galleries are doing is establishing new beachheads in London to find new collectors from Russia, Asia and the Middle East who are more comfortable there than in New York."

Nearly a third of London's 5,955 inhabitants who have a net worth of more than $30m (£18.5m) are non-doms, according to Wealth-X, a company that compiles data on the super-rich. Billionaire art collectors with homes in the capital include Lakshmi Mittal (net worth: £9.8bn), Roman Abramovich (£7.5bn) and Victor Pinchuk (£2.6bn).

Tully said the globalisation of the art market meant that New York galleries were no longer as likely to limit their expansion to the west coast of America. Big-name artists now want a global audience for their work and would jump ship to rival galleries to gain it.

She added that major US galleries also hoped to emulate the success of Larry Gagosian, considered the most powerful art dealer in the world, who has 12 galleries worldwide, including two in London. Pace has seven locations worldwide, including a space in Beijing, while Werner also has two galleries in Germany and one in New York.
Tully said: "Dealers don't want to lose artists because another dealer has opened a gallery in London. It's a major threat to Zwirner; he absolutely needs to expand to Europe because of the danger of his artists being poached. He's not lost an artist to another dealer except Franz West to Gagosian. Pace is a much older blue-chip gallery, but they're also forced to open [in London] because Gagosian would eat up a bunch of their artists."

Gagosian's latest addition is a 17,760 sq ft space in a former factory redesigned by French "starchitect" Jean Nouvel in Le Bourget near Paris. It opens this month with an exhibition by Anselm Kiefer – in competition with Austrian dealer Thaddaeus Ropac, who announced six months earlier that his new gallery would open at the same time with a show by the German painter and sculptor.

Several of the artists whom Zwirner represents, including Marlene Dumas and Chris Ofili, already have London galleries. Its London director, Angela Choon, said they will respect the relationships those artists already have with London galleries and focus on exhibiting other artists. Their opening exhibition is new work by Luc Tuymans, who has not shown in London since 2004.

Michael Werner opens with an exhibition of new paintings by Peter Doig, who is already represented here by Victoria Miro. Kadee Robbins said: "I hope we just leave it to the artists to see the best resolution for them."

New York-based art adviser Wendy Cromwell predicted that some of the larger London galleries may be upgrading their real estate. "The art world has become very event driven. There's a certain class of collector whom these galleries are going after who like to be seen at openings, at the Frieze Art Fair, who think bigger is better and more is more," she said.

Tully added: "It will be good for the London market to wake up, because the Americans are invading."

Several London galleries have recently moved to bigger spaces. Blain Southern is moving this week from Dering Street to a larger Mayfair space on Hanover Square. The not-for-profit David Roberts Art Foundation last month opened its new 12,000 sq ft space in Camden.

However, smaller Modern and impressionist galleries, such as those already under threat from two major property redevelopments on Cork Street, could find themselves squeezed as the competition among contemporary galleries intensifies.
Bernard Jacobson, whose eponymous gallery is one of the 11 under threat on the Mayfair street, said the developers' heads had been turned by the US galleries and that they planned to build fewer but larger art spaces in an attempt to attract big names. "They think they're going to sell 10,000 sq ft units to the likes of the Gagosian."
Cromwell said: "I could see them being forced out. Few if any of those galleries have street-level space in New York and what's happened here is really an indication of what is happening in London."

Harry Blain, co-owner of Blain Southern, who is considered one of Britain's most powerful art dealers, said the New York galleries' London expansion would enhance the city's reputation as a global art destination.

Curator and academic Andrew Renton, the director of Marlborough Contemporary, a new gallery opened on the second floor of long-established Marlborough Fine Art in Mayfair, said: "It confirms where we are as the central location in the world for contemporary and modern art. London has had a dynamic art scene for 20 years, but not necessarily a dynamic art market. Now we've got both."

Art Review: Turner Prize @ Tate Britain

Paul Noble, Public Toilet, 1999. Copyright Paul Noble / Gagosian, London 

The Turner Prize is one of art’s most prestigious prizes, with former winners including Damien Hirst, Gillian Wearing and Chris Ofili. Yet it almost always sparks controversy with its nominations. This year’s are no exception.

After a brief sojourn in Gateshead, the prize has returned to its regular home at Tate Britain, and visitors can expect much boundary pushing from the four finalists.

First up is the bookies’ favourite Paul Noble, who’s spent the last 16 years creating the fictional town of Nobson. His impressive large scale drawings are immaculately detailed yet are inhabited by what can only be described as anthropomorphised turds. His work is the most accessible of the four artists, engaging visitors through both his sense of humour and attention to detail, though it can lose its lustre with repeat viewing.

Luke Fowler has created a documentary film around the psychiatrist RD Laing who went against the common medical teachings of the time to introduce a radical new way to treat schizophrenics. It’s a fascinating story but at 93 minutes long is unlikely to hold the attention of visitors for its full length.

Elizabeth Price’s video is thankfully shorter at 20 minutes long but starts off with the (to some people) dry subject of interior church design and nomenclature. However, the rapid slide changes accompanied by claps and clicks keep the audience on its toes. This then segues into music clips and finally coverage of a fire in a Manchester Woolworths. The sections link together tenuously and, though we liked the snappy editing, its message felt a little bit garbled.

The final entry is from Spartacus Chetwynd – an artist who changed her name to remind people that they have a choice. Her performance works consist of home-made costumes and props accompanied by a pulsating soundtrack. It involves a bizarre scenario where a puppet in the shape of a mandrake root requires that audience members leave one by one, either directly or after listening to its words of wisdom. Coupled with an air-filled giant sofa, it’s hard not to feel a sense of child-like wonderment and get drawn into Chetwynd’ s nonsensical world.

Some of these works are truly bizarre but we all know that this is to be expected from the Turner Prize. Although this may not be its strongest year, the four artists are so varied that judging an overall winner will be a difficult task. We have a soft spot for Chetwynd’s absurdity but think that Price is the outsider who might just snatch it from Noble.

Sudbury Art Club celebrates the season

Shehnaz Pabani is one of the 50-some artists showing work at the Sudbury Art Club's annual fall show.

The colours, shapes and forms in nature help Shehnaz Pabani keep an even keel in her busy life.
Pabani will be one of more than 50 artists with paintings on display at the Sudbury Art Club Fall Show and Sale, taking place Oct. 19, 20 and 21 at the CNIB auditorium at the corner of York and Regent Streets.
“Before you start a painting, you have to contemplate — make time to calm yourself and really look at your subject,” Pabani said. “I find painting can really be like a meditation.”

Calm, quiet time for herself is what helped her maintain her equilibrium during the years she was raising two children and maintaining her busy medical practice. Her home schedule is a little less demanding now that her children are both in their late 20s, however Pabani still practises family medicine, and teaches clinical skills in her position as assistant professor at the Northern Ontario School of Medicine.

“I find painting rejuvenates me,” she said. “I can come home beat from a long day with patients and students but sometimes stay up late into the night painting. When it comes to thinking about doing my art, I often get new energy.”

Pabani said one of her painting goals is to replicate the beauty in nature.

“In Islam, as in other beliefs, nature is revered as Allah or God’s creation,” she said. “When you see the beauty of a sunset, or the amazing form and colour of flowers, every detail  is so fascinating, it’s really humbling.”

Pabani recently completed a watercolour painting of a Cyclamen she pampered for more than a year, and finally coaxed into flowering. It’s no wonder she has titled the painting Harmony. She says it has given her countless hours of beauty, both in the pot and on the canvass.

You can see Harmony on display at the Sudbury Art Club fall show and sale. The event begins Friday evening with a free wine and cheese reception from 7 to 9 p.m.  Saturday and Sunday the show runs from 10:00 a.m. till 4:00 p.m.

Asian art schools form body

Heads of art schools from 15 countries in Asia on Saturday established a joint educational body to forge their ties and provide art training to students from less-privileged areas.

The Korea National University of Arts announced that its president Park Jong-won was elected the first president of the Asian League of Institutes of the Arts which was established on the day. Members are representatives of art schools or arts scenes from Korea, China, Japan, Mongolia, Malaysia, Bangladesh, Nepal, Vietnam, Myanmar, Kazakhstan, Uzbekistan, Turkey, Singapore, India and Indonesia.

Park Jong-won (sixth from left on the front row), president of Korea National University of Arts, poses with representatives of art schools from 15 Asian countries at the founding of the Asian League of Institutes of the Arts in Seoggwan-dong, Seoul,

The delegations decided to develop a joint-curriculum for arts and hold regular conferences, seminars as well as open debates together. They have also agreed to support art students from less-privileged regions and build up international volunteering programs to enhance cultural exchange among the students and teachers.

At the first meeting of its kind, Ju Tzong-Ching, president of Taipei National University of Arts, and Erdenetsogt Sonintogos, rector of Mogolian State University of Arts and Culture, were elected the vice presidents. Soeprapto Soedjono, rector of Mongolian State University of Arts and Culture, was appointed as an auditor.

The organization will congress biannually and the next meeting will he held in 2014 at the Taiepi National University of Arts.

Shell National Students Art Competition marks 45th year

 MANILA, Philippines - College student artists who stood out through their creative explorations in the visual arts will be honored at the awards ceremony of the 45th Shell National Students Art Competition on Oct. 10 at The Ayala Museum in Makati. The milestone anniversary testifies to the inexhaustible reserve of upcoming talents from across the country, and confirms the program’s commitment to the development of Filipino youth artists.

To be feted are the finalists and major winners in the competition’s five categories: Oil/Acrylic, Watercolor, Sculpture, and Digital Fine Arts, which are all open-themed, and the Calendar category with the theme Buhay Makulay, depicting our people’s customs and traditions, as well as the many natural/man-made wonders of the Philippines. The best calendar entries will be featured in the 2013 corporate calendar of Pilipinas Shell.

The National Students Art Competition is now the country’s longest-running art contest for students. It started as a search for a suitable calendar subject in 1952, and over the years, in a small but memorable way, it has helped jumpstart the careers of many acclaimed figures in the field. Some members of this year’s jury are products of the competition. Judges in the Oil/Acrylic category are Soler Santos, Nestor Vinluan, Lito Carating, Rodel Tapaya, and Rock Drilon. Jury members in Watercolor are Angel Cacnio, Renato Habulan, Elmer Borlongan, Nemi Miranda, and Antipas Delotavo. Sculpture category judges are Ral Arrogante, Michael Cacnio, Ramon Orlina, Reggie Yuson, and Salvador Alonday. Digital Fine Arts judges are Jose Tence Ruiz, Mario Parial, Pablo Biglang-Awa, Dopy Doplon, and Norberto Roldan. Jurors in the Calendar category are Danny Dalena, Raul Isidro, Angelito Antonio, Raul Lebajo, and Edgar Doctor.

Artists of the top-scoring entries will receive cash prizes up to P50,000 each, award plaques, and gifts. Schools of the grand prize winners will be presented a special grant in support of the Faculty Development Program.

The public exhibition showcasing the best 100 works will be unveiled at the ground floor gallery of the Ayala Museum after the awards ceremony. It will run until Oct. 21.

The Kimbell Art Museum Casts Major Shadow

A rendering of an addition by Renzo Piano for the Louis Kahn-designed Kimbell Art Museum.

Eric M. Lee, the director of Fort Worth’s Kimbell Art Museum — regarded by some as the country’s finest small museum — had his first day on the job three and a half years ago, but his admiration of the museum dates back to 1987, when he was an art history major at Yale.

It was then that the museum’s building, with its famed vaulted galleries and impressive landscaping, captured Mr. Lee’s imagination, prompting him to write a paper on the architecture and the mastermind behind it, Louis Kahn.

“Already then, I thought the Kimbell was the most exciting museum in the country,” Mr. Lee said.

That same year, during a visit to the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York, he was mesmerized by Caravaggio’s “The Cardsharps,” a seminal work on loan to the Met that was one of several famous acquisitions by Edmund P. Pillsbury, the former director who added several renowned European pieces to the Kimbell’s permanent collection and put the small museum on the national radar.

Now, Mr. Lee, 46, seems determined to put his own indelible stamp on the museum, which is celebrating its 40th anniversary with a much-anticipated exhibition: “The Kimbell at 40: An Evolving Masterpiece.”

Featuring more than 220 masterworks, this sprawling retrospective, which opens on Sunday, underscores the museum’s status as one of the country’s most prestigious repositories of some of the world’s greatest art.

Like Mr. Pillsbury, Mr. Lee recently managed to thrust the Kimbell into the center of the art world through his careful engineering of a major purchase, “The Torment of Saint Anthony,” a painting by young Michelangelo. This landmark acquisition emphasized Mr. Lee’s art historian gravitas and his ability to work with the board to keep the museum moving forward.

“I’m honored to help lead the museum into the next chapter,” said Mr. Lee, the fourth director in the Kimbell’s history, whose slightly lilting voice reveals his roots in Clinton, N.C.

To that end, Mr. Lee is working with the architect Renzo Piano on the museum’s first annex expansion.

The new wing, which cost $135 million and is scheduled to open late next year, will appear as a low-slung pavilion of smooth concrete, Douglas-fir beams, and stretched scrims of fabric, crowned by a floating glass roof. The design was several years in the making, and during that time Mr. Lee, with the museum’s board, offered judicious suggestions about the 82,000-square-foot building’s final look.

“For the expansion, I really didn’t want us to lose the original Kimbell’s sense of intimacy,” Mr. Lee said.

After seeing the initial choice of white plasterboard for the gallery walls, he voiced his preference for a material that echoed the warm travertine and concrete walls of the Kimbell’s original building. “Ultimately,” Mr. Lee said, “Piano introduced a light gray concrete.”

During his tenure, Mr. Lee has also spearheaded several key acquisitions. He snapped up Poussin’s “Sacrament of Ordination” for $24.3 million after doggedly pursuing the piece through a labyrinth of negotiations involving the collection of an English duke, a failed sale at Christie’s auction house and an elusive export license.

“We couldn’t let this Poussin, one of the greatest old masterworks to come on the market in years, pass us by,” Mr. Lee said.

But it was clearly the Michelangelo purchase that burnished Mr. Lee’s reputation as a rising star. Learning about the rare work’s availability on his second day at the Kimbell, he argued for its acquisition. But first he had to prove the painting’s authenticity.

The Metropolitan Museum of Art’s conservation department conducted a thorough examination of the piece and concluded that it was indeed an original Michelangelo.

“When we couldn’t come up with a single argument for not buying it, I became totally convinced it was right,” Mr. Lee said. “But getting to that point was pretty nerve-racking.”

In the end, the Kimbell agreed to pay what was reported to be $6.5 million for the Michelangelo. When it debuted at the museum in September 2009, it was one of only four Michelangelo easel paintings known to exist.

“If one Kimbell painting is mentioned on TripAdvisor, it is this one,” Mr. Lee said.

Mr. Lee faced another challenge two years later when he had to use his skills as an art scholar and marketer for “Caravaggio and His Followers in Rome,” the second-largest Caravaggio exhibition ever staged in the United States.

“Since Caravaggio is not a household name, I wanted to pull out all the marketing stops by making the commercials like movie commercials — eye-catching, melodramatic, even a bit kitschy,” he said.

Mr. Lee’s gamble paid off. Attendance went from a modest few hundred per day to 5,000 during the show’s last weekends.

This ability to bring fresh curatorial and marketing initiatives to the Kimbell has earned its director praise from his Fort Worth museum peers.

“I so appreciate the ease and youthful spirit that Eric brings to carrying on the awesome tradition of the Kimbell,” said Andrew J. Walker, director of the neighboring Amon Carter Museum of American Art, “while also bringing it forward with the new building.”

Sharjah Ruler opens Islamic Art exhibition

Supreme Council Member and Ruler of Sharjah opened on Sunday, an exhibition of Islamic Art at the American University of Sharjah (AUS).Entitled ‘The Beauty of Words’ the exhibition will run for a month at the Rotunda of the AUS Main building.

The exhibition showcases a selection of around 100 distinctive items of Islamic calligraphy from Shaikh Faisal bin Qassim Al Thani Museum in Doha, Qatar.

Commenting the distinctive organisation of the exhibition, the Ruler thanked Shaikh Faisal bin Qassim Al Thani, collector and owner of Faisal Bin Qassim Museum, for sharing the unique pieces of art with AUS to make the initiative a reality.

Earlier, AUS Chancellor Dr. Peter Heath expressed his gratitude to Shaikh Faisal bin Qassim Al Thani on supporting this initiative. ‘One significant dimension of the university’s mission consists in cultivating the fine arts, literature, and sciences within the region’, said Dr. Heath.

Vice Chancellor for Public Affairs Salem Al Qaseer and Vice Chancellor for Development and Alumni Affairs Nada Mourtada also expressed their appreciation to Shaikh Faisal for his decision in selecting AUS as a venue for this first ‘Voyaging Museum’ exhibition in the Middle East, which is in line with the University’s mission in establishing strong ties with the community.

Sheikha Al Anood Bint Faisal Al Thani, Vice-Chair of the Board of Trustees of Shaikh Faisal bin Qassim Al Thani Museum said: ‘We are especially proud of this initiative, which demonstrates our mission to encourage cultural exchange and promote heritage’.

The ‘Beauty of Words’ exhibition is curated by Dr. Dieter Marcos, Director of the Shaikh Faisal bin Qassim Al Thani Museum.

Successful Art in the Park event clears path for October's Featured Artist, Melissa Fults

Despite the brisk winter chill that bit through the damp air on Saturday, Shelbyville's first annual Art in the Park event was clearly a hit with local town folks. Many onlookers were pleasantly surprised to discover so much talent residing right here in their own backyard. This month's Featured Artist for the Bedford Art Gallery--Melissa Fults--is among that vast pool of talent lurking in our midst. Melissa is being honored in a reception on Monday, October 8th at 7:00pm inside the Bedford Art Gallery (located inside The Fly art building). Her work, which is currently on display for a limited time, will hang through the remainder of the month, so please take a few moments to stop in and see the display if you are unable to make an appearance at the reception.

 

Melissa was born and raised in Woodbury, TN and discovered her gift for drawing sometime during the second or third grade. She says she "can remember drawing pictures for [my] classmates." However, it wasn't until high school that her talents truly began to blossom and develop into the talent on display now.

Although she loves to sketch animals and landscapes, Melissa doesn't limit herself to any one subject area. She works mostly with pastels, ink, acrylic and charcoal. To be able to recognize the true beauty of her work you will need to drop by the Bedford Art Gallery sometime this month between the hours of 11:00am-4:00pm on Monday, Tuesday and Thursday. Or better yet, stop in on Monday night to meet the artist and listen as she talks about here works on display. 

We hope to see you out there on Monday night. But if you can't make it, please try to squeeze a few minutes out of your day sometime during the remainder of this month to drop by and see Melissa's work while it's still on display...along with many work from many other talented residents, such as Kevin Rains, who carves amazing figurines and statues of bears, Indians, etc. with a CHAIN SAW (some of you may have seen his live demonstration this Saturday at Art in the Park)! We have a lot of new art members and a lot of new works on display...Open Monday, Tuesday and Thursday from 11:00-4:00pm, as well as during all special events at the Fly, and on weekends and evenings by appointment.

Art Studio Tour adds artists, consolidates locations

Pat Williams of Luxemburg works in her studio on one of her wildlife paintings in advance of next weekend's Northeastern Wisconsin Art Studio Tour. Williams is chairperson and one of the host artists.

The Northeastern Wisconsin version of the Art Studio Tour returns next weekend with some differences.One change is the availability of more artists.

“Last year, we had 15 artists, and this year we have 18,” said Pat Williams, chairperson.

“The Art Studio Tour is to give the public an opportunity to visit the artists and to see how work is done,” Williams said. “What we want to do is try to help the public understand what it takes to create real good art and how it’s made so that they have a greater appreciation of art.”

All the artists are on hand.

“We open our studios to allow people to come into our spaces to talk to us personally, to watch us work, to see how things are made, to ask questions and, if they desire, to purchase something directly from the artist,” Williams said. “That has a lot more value in the long run.”

The tour is artist-run for the first time. In the past, it was a function of the Northeastern Wisconsin Arts Council.

“This year, we have artists who have been on the tour before hosting either new artists or other artists who have been on before but would rather be at a different space and be at a host artist’s residence,” Williams said.

Some artists “cannot for one reason or another have John Q. Public come into their space or their home,” she said.

The 18 artists are at 10 locations.“I think from everything that we have heard so far that the the public is very excited about the opportunity to visit more than one artist at a stop,” Williams said. “To have several artists at any given location is a draw. It helps them with gas.”

It’s the 11th year for the tour.

China art auctioneers eye slice of Hong Kong market

A leading China auctioneer holds a debut sale in Hong Kong on Sunday, lured by the city's international buyers, low tax regime and stable regulatory framework in a trend that could bring more competition for global firms.

China Guardian's sale of Chinese art and classical furniture in the former British colony follows its rise as the world's third largest auction house on the crest of China's art market boom, with sales of $1.77 billion last year.

"We want to win over more overseas market and buyers," said Wang Yannan, the president of China Guardian and the well-connected daughter of former Communist Party leader Zhao Ziyang.

The sale, though relatively small, is seen as a symbolic foray by China's top auction firm into the turf of goliaths Christie's and Sotheby's who have long dominated international auction hubs like Hong Kong, New York and London.

China Guardian's key rival, Poly International is also planning an inaugural Hong Kong sale in late November, while A&F Auction and Beijing Rongbao Auction aim to enter Hong Kong in one or two years, according to art market reports.

China's wave of millionaire buyers and investors have helped propel Hong Kong into the world's fourth largest art auction hub, with nearly 7 percent of global art auction revenue in 2011, according to French art database Artprice.com<ARTF.PA >.

"It's great for competition," Francois Curiel, Christie's Asia president, told Reuters. "Whenever I see more auction houses coming into the market, the pie became larger."

Some, however, felt the field was getting crowded.

"It's like separating a bowl of rice into two," said Tim Lin of the Lin & Lin Gallery in Beijing and Taipei, referring to increased competition for Hong Kong's multi-billion dollar art auction market.

"How long will they last? It's everyone's guess."

Art dealers and experts say the Chinese expansion into Hong Kong is also being driven by a tightening regulatory environment in China, that has grappled with widespread art crimes including tax evasion, a proliferation of fakes, money laundering and manipulative bidding practices.

TAX PROBE BLOW TO CHINA ART MARKET
In April, a large-scale Chinese customs probe into tax evasion on art imports delivered a blow to the art market, with at least six prominent art dealers, collectors and artists being investigated, according to art dealers and Chinese media reports.

"The tax probe had a huge impact on the spring auctions in China," said the owner of an art gallery in Taipei who is a frequent buyer in the Chinese art market but who declined to be identified because of the sensitivity of the matter.

"Everyone finds himself in danger so the market is extremely cold."

According to market research firm ArtTactic, total auction sales this spring from the biggest four auction houses in the China market dropped to $1.5 billion, 32 percent lower than the autumn season in 2011 and 43 percent less than a year before.

"The tax investigation has cast a shadow on the Chinese art market," said David Lin of Taipei's Lin & Lin Art Gallery.

"It has a psychological effect on buyers and sellers in China ... The chain reaction is going to last for a while."
China Guardian's 2012 auction sales tally dropped 46 percent to 2.14 billion yuan this spring season, from 3.98 billion yuan in the 2011 autumn auction, but Wang attributed this largely to a stuttering Chinese economy.

"It also has something to do with the slowdown in the economy, but it has nothing to do with the tax investigation," Wang of China Guardian, told Reuters.

Art market experts, however, say Hong Kong's laissez-faire economy, solid regulatary framework and zero-tariffs on art imports, make it a secure and stable alternative for China's auction firms.

Although Beijing has lowered its import duties on arts to 6 percent from 12 percent since the beginning of 2012, another 17 percent of value-added tax still poses a huge burden to Chinese auction houses.

"Hong Kong is a more liberal tax region," said Simon Young, a law professor at the University of Hong Kong.

"One would have wondered why they didn't move sooner." (Editing by James Pomfret and Sanjeev Miglani)

Women on art: What does 'woman artist' mean?

"Elles: Women Artists from the Centre Pompidou," opening at Seattle Art Museum on Oct. 11, 2012, features renowned artists from around the world. The Seattle Times talks with a trio of local artists about their work and how, or whether, being female has an influence on their work.

"I'm a little frustrated by all the frenzy around being a woman artist," says Seattle artist Amanda Manitach.

 

" ... Because there are places in the world where women still can't be seen, there is still a need to show women's work," says artist Sherry Markovitz.

 

Maria Blanchard's "Sois Sage or Jeanne d'Arc," 1917, is one of the works in "Elles," opening at SAM on Thursday. 

 

"The Blue Room (La chambre bleu)," one of the works in "Elles" at SAM, is by Suzanne Valadon, who, tired of the passive life of a model, became an artist. 

Banners at Seattle Art Museum announce that "women are taking over," getting us primed for the big exhibition titled "Elles: Women Artists from the Centre Pompidou," which debuts Thursday.
In some ways that is true. One hundred and thirty significant works of art by 75 female artists have arrived from Paris to take over the special exhibition galleries.
And, in a bold move inspired by the Pompidou show, SAM is radically changing its own installation of modern and contemporary art, a display that's been in place since the big remodel in 2007.
The third-floor galleries have been emptied of works by men, and through Feb. 17, 2013, they will be filled with work from SAM's permanent collection, local private collections and a solo show with new work by Victoria Haven.
We'll get to see art by such heavy hitters as Louise Bourgeois, Imogen Cunningham, Eva Hesse, Yayoi Kusama and Georgia O'Keeffe.
On the other hand, women artists aren't just arriving. They're already here. Seattle is home to an extraordinary number of successful, interesting female artists. I invited three of them, each at a different career stage, to talk about whether being a woman affects their work, and the significance of major museum exhibitions of art made exclusively by women.

SHERRY MARKOVITZ
Media: Painting, mixed-media sculpture
Education: Master of fine arts, printmaking, University of Washington
Last show: "Provenance: In Honor of Arlene Schnitzer," Jordan Schnitzer Museum of Art, University of Oregon
Q: You were in graduate school in the early 1970s, during a time when feminism and civil-rights efforts were breaking down barriers within art and in society at large. Did any of that impact your emergence as an artist?
A: It really informed a lot of what I was already inclined to do. It gave me freedom to explore subjects that were close to me, especially familial relationships.
After grad school, I worked in the Women's Studies department and I was very influenced by that extant of that world. My first piece out of grad school was funded by a grant that I'd gotten — (art critic and curator) Lucy Lippard was one of the jurors — and I did a piece called "Women, Body and Space, A Personal Ritual." It opened up too much emotional territory for me and I decided that it was not a direction I wanted to go.
Q: After turning to figurative painting, you then focused on beading and embellishing, craft methods that might be considered "feminine." You have used these methods to transform trophy heads, markers of masculinity. Is this a deliberate juxtaposition?
A: I think it comes out in the hunting trophies. The classic emblems of a hunter, which is something that is as far away from my upbringing as you could get.
And then the embroidery, beading and sewing feminizes them. But that's just a beginning. I knew what I was doing, but I didn't have an agenda. There was just a foreignness to hunting that I was interested in.
At the same time, I was interested in Native American culture and indigenous ways of survival. It wasn't just contemporary maleness, it was cultural history, going all the way back to the cave paintings.
I'm still interested in that in some of my new paintings. I'm interested not only in male/female contrasts but cultural contrasts, the dynamics of misunderstanding, in how we see the other culture and how the other culture sees us.
Q: What do you think about a major art exhibition in 2012 comprised entirely of artists who are women?
A: People have told me that my career or my subject matter have suffered because I'm a woman, making comments like, "Men won't buy dolls." I don't pay attention to that, but I do think women still need to be shown — separately and together. Because, historically, women have been treated the way they have — which was not to be seen — and because there are places in the world where women still can't be seen, there is still a need to show women's work.
VICTORIA HAVEN
Media: Mixed media including painting, drawing, sculpture
Education: MFA, Goldsmiths College/University of London
Last solo exhibit: "Hit the North" at Greg Kucera Gallery
Q: Catharina Manchanda (curator of modern and contemporary art, who organized "Elles: SAM" along with Patricia Junker) asked you to create new work for "Elles: SAM." How did you respond to being positioned among these well-known artists who are all women?
A: The way Catharina described it made me feel like a kid in a candy store. We walked through the galleries and she said, "And the Joan Mitchells would be here, and then Agnes Martin and Jo Baer, and then the Frankenthalers will be in this room. And then Sherrie Levine and Jenny Holzer and Adrian Piper." And everyone that she said, they were all artists that I look to.
Q: You've created a new body of work for this show. What are we going to see?
A: The only piece that's not brand-new is "Mix Tape" (a large-scale wall painting of the label for a mix tape). It was carved out of the wall of my old studio and it has been transformed into a manifestation of what the whole show has been conceived as: a series of portable monuments that address ideas of progression and belonging and permanence.
They're about a very specific relation to studio spaces I've had — a progression across Seattle — I'm in my 11th studio! But the title "Proposed Land Use Action" has a double meaning. It refers to my geographical position in my urban landscape, but also my position in the landscape of art making.
Q: Your work is often formal and minimal; gender issues don't seem to be overtly present. Can you point to ways that being a woman affects your work?
A: With "Mix Tape," all of my relationships around this tape happened to be relationships with guys — friends who made the tape for me in 1986 — and at the time most of those bands were four or five guys.
They're sort of my muses. I've thought about it as a kind of role reversal. But also that wondering about how you belong, or fit into a landscape of relationships, is embedded in that piece. For me it (gender) is overt in that piece but it may not be as overt in other pieces.
Being given this position in this continuum, this art-making legacy, has brought up questions about how I fit in with the other women in this show. But, also, I'm always butting heads and overlapping and configuring my relationship with the forefathers of modernism. Maybe my job is just to make my work the best way that I can and add to the conversation in that way.
AMANDA MANITACH
Media: Paintings, drawings, video
Education: Bachelor of arts, literature, Oral Roberts University
Last exhibition: "Can't Get There From Here" at Lawrimore Project
Q: As an emerging artist, what are your thoughts on being a woman in the art world today? Is it something you think about?
A: I honestly don't think about it at all. I'm a little frustrated by all the frenzy around being a woman artist. It feels like it's ghettoizing women all over again. People ask me if I'm a feminist — I don't consider myself a feminist artist but anyone who has common sense these days is a feminist. It's about human decency.
Q: But you do seem to be interested in issues related to being a woman, mother-daughter images, motifs about the female body.
A: It's a paradox for me. I'm not setting out to do anything for my gender as an artist. I'm just compelled to make art. But my work does have something to do with gender, these pictures of vaginas and women. The female body comes up a lot in my work. I'm a pastor's kid and I grew up really wanting to be a boy.
When I first menstruated, it was a heartbreak. If I had grown up in a liberal environment, who knows, it might have been different, but I didn't know how to deal with those feelings of being a girl.
I still have an uneasy relationship with my body. I had an eating disorder for 10 years. A lot of what I do is trying to reconcile having this body; it's painful and a struggle.
Q: One of the ideas that "Elles" explores is how traditional ways of approaching art history can be disrupted. Does that relate to your own work?
A: I have an adaptive approach and I recycle history all the time. I start from literature or art or performances. Earlier this year, I was obsessed with the Vienna Actionists and I wanted to do my own adaptations of their performances that involved a female but I wanted to be in the active role. In almost all of their performances, the female was the object, being penetrated, and acted upon. I wanted to be the protagonist.