Art Basel Hong Kong: Reputations and Deals Both Churning, 11 People With Their Own Agendas

This, after all, is the primary market.

For the art world, Art Basel is the biggest event of the year, no contest.

Back in the 1960s, Tom Wolfe took a census of the art world — don't expect him to say anything kind — and wrote: "…this crowd (not counting the artists) numbers about 750 in Rome, 500 in Milan, 1,750 in Paris, 1,250 in London, 2,000 all together in Berlin, Munich and Düsseldorf, 3,000 in New York, plus about 1,000 more scattered around the rest of the known world. That is the entire art world — roughly ten thousand people, the population of a small town! — penned inside the walls of these eight cities."

There was no Art Basel then. Later, New York got too vulgar, London too flashy, Paris too pompous and too in love with itself, and the Italians cared only about vintages… In 1970, people in the circle invented Basel. Art could not only be a carnival — it could actually be built into a small village. Ten thousand people, gathering once a year.

If one Basel isn't enough, make it two, or three.

Hong Kong is the third. Backed by a mysterious mainland, Hong Kong once had to rely on its status as a tax-free port to compete in the art world at all. But few people probably guessed that Chinese wealth would one day leave the whole world staring.

Switzerland's Art Basel group had its eye on this slice of the pie. China has more and more art investors, and the West has grown more and more interested in Chinese contemporary art. Hong Kong is the best place to cut into that pie: art transactions are untaxed and shipping is easy. In 2013 the Art Basel group bought Hong Kong's local fair, ART HK, and rebuilt it as Art Basel Hong Kong.

"It was only by coming to Hong Kong that Basel truly became an international exhibition," Marc Spiegler, Art Basel's global director, likes to say.

And the halo of "Basel" gave Hong Kong's artists, its galleries and the city itself dazzling international exposure and a stamp of professional credibility.

Each side got what it wanted.

In 2013, the first Art Basel Hong Kong drew 60,000 people, and the single highest sale was around a million dollars. This year visitor numbers reached 80,000, and the highest sale price hit US$35 million.

Those numbers helped Hong Kong become Asia's art center in six years, and China become the world's second-largest art market after the United States.

Of course, Marc Spiegler has grander wishes than that. He does not want to be tied to money alone, so he has handed himself the job of cultural ambassador. "We have to let culture soak into every layer of Hong Kong society, because you never know whether some kid growing up in Mong Kok is the next Jack Ma."

Li Danqing

Applause! Thirty-five million — in US dollars, no less.

By Tom Wolfe's reckoning, six months ago Li Danqing, who works in the secondary market, was still a long way from this trade, or from this exalted little village.

But right as we are talking — the fair had been open less than two hours, the ribbon had just been cut, Marc Spiegler had just finished his remarks, and the assorted VIPs among those ten thousand people had just filed in wearing their noble, reserved smiles — Li Danqing had already finished three-quarters of her business.

By now she looks like a serious deal maker. A US$35 million painting. Big enough.

Big enough that she can turn around and speak for the whole art world: "I think the Asian art market has grown more and more mature. If you'd brought a masterwork like this to Asia two or three years ago, people probably couldn't have told what was good. But now there's more education, and people can tell good work from ordinary work much more clearly."

She sold Willem de Kooning's Untitled XII. Another de Kooning, Untitled XXV, sold at Christie's New York in 2016 for US$66.3 million, the artist's highest price at auction anywhere in the world.

Li Danqing's main job that day was still moving product, and what she set was the highest sale price in the history of Art Basel Hong Kong. But a deal this size doesn't get made in the twenty-odd hours the fair is open across three days. Long before it, clients had been sorted and lined up; the de Kooning was probably already spoken for by some big name on an Excel spreadsheet. Today she was only here to meet the big name face to face.

"A cover-worthy work like this should by rights only turn up in a New York public museum, or somewhere like Christie's. We went to such lengths to bring it to Hong Kong because we wanted to give Asian collectors the best of the best. In Asia you can't see a masterwork this important in a museum or anywhere else. If these clients don't go to New York's museums, the public doesn't see it, and they may never know what the best actually looks like."

Li Danqing stood hemmed in by a steady stream of people pressing forward to gaze at the painting. Under the fair's bright yellow lights and white walls, she said all this the way a preacher delivers the gospel, and I was certainly not the only one being baptized. But whether she was speaking for human art, or for an authentic de Kooning you might otherwise never see, one of the painting's biggest selling points was that it came from Paul Allen's collection.

You have probably heard the name Paul Allen. His holdings rank among the world's top private collections. He owns the world's largest yacht (no sense of what that means?), an NBA team in Los Angeles, a band and a hockey team too… Still nothing? His partner when he started out was Bill Gates, though the two haven't been close in recent decades.

In 1987, Paul Allen paid US$517,000 for this painting. Think that's expensive? The hedge fund manager Ken Griffin once bought another de Kooning from the billionaire David Geffen for US$300 million.

Among the ten thousand, these are the people who matter.

William Moffitt

Will leans on the railing. He hasn't worked out what role he plays here. To be exact, what role he will play a few years from now. Being "still some distance from becoming a top artist or a top collector" sounds very ordinary, and neither talent nor money closes that gap overnight. But this is Basel, and this is how the circle works: however far he is from "becoming" one, he is genuinely close to the other kind of "top" — the top artists and collectors themselves. This, after all, is the primary market.

In the art world's primary market, collectors and galleries buy and sell directly at places like fairs. Picture countless banknotes churning above the booths, waiting to drop into the gallery owners' pockets. The secondary market adds a middleman, or a mouthpiece, like an auction house, helping a painting find the buyer who really wants it. There is a popular, "easy to understand" line in the art world: the secondary market drives prices up, and the primary market drives them "down."

These days, though, the primary market moves an enormous volume of contemporary art. Just look at the sales at Art Basel's other two fairs, in Switzerland and Miami, and your head spins.

Last year Art Basel in Switzerland closed 500 deals worth US$300 million within two days of opening. Every year, of course, brings masterworks like the de Kooning that make an outstanding contribution to the history of human art: last year a painting by the 1980s expressionist Jean-Michel Basquiat sold for US$18 million. The year before, a painting by the American artist Frank Stella sold for US$14 million. No surprise, the collector was from Asia.

And who knows, William Moffitt — Will's full name, which sounds a bit grander — may one day narrow the gap with the top tier… Born in New York, living in Hong Kong, he is young and has access to big fairs, big masters, big middlemen and big markets. But there is also more and more he doesn't understand.

"I have some good friends whose parents are extremely wealthy. Their fathers don't understand art at all, so they tell their kids to go buy art instead. These friends of mine are basically still kids. They go buy masterworks in jeans, sneakers and T-shirts. How would you tell? There's no way to tell they're major buyers."

These friends' fathers say: "I'll give you five million dollars. I trust you. Go buy some art!"

Emilia Müller

If you still haven't settled on a role, you can do what people do on talent shows and come along to keep a friend company.

Emilia will tell you first that she is not part of the circle. She is here with a friend who works at a gallery, on seven weeks of paid leave (really), just passing through from Berlin to look around.

She says she prefers watching the people here.

As an architect, she doesn't like the paintings here, too bright and too loud. "It's too jarring, too gaudy. We and the artists are two different circles. We like very precise objects and works, something in the Japanese style, works with geometry." (Taste.)

Emilia Müller holds a cup of coffee. Out of place. "What's interesting is that they tell you these two days are the VIP preview, so I thought the hall would be empty, but now it's almost completely full." (Who is "they"?)

"At European fairs I can tell from someone's clothes, and from their attitude and manner, whether they're wealthy and what class they belong to." (Also on seven weeks of paid leave, also here with a gallery friend?)

"A wealthy collector's clothing is usually understated, for instance, never too flashy. But I don't know Asian society well, and here at Basel I'm completely lost. I can't tell whether someone is a seasoned collector." (Who exactly are they?)

"I've noticed something interesting: there are two kinds of beautiful Asian women at Basel. The first kind dress very elegantly and precisely. They don't wear ordinary clothes, and there's always some careful detail that stands out. You see women dressed this way in every age group."

"The second kind I call the 'porcelain doll' type. Very young, around 22, heavy makeup, cute like a doll, not tall, small-framed."

"But I can't tell whether these women are wearing a $1,000 dress or a $10 dress. I can't tell if they're a rich man's wife or someone else. I really can't tell." (Does it matter?)

"I think this may also be what other European gallery owners at Basel find so hard: working out from these women's clothes who is a collector and who is just a looker-on. It really is too hard."

Emilia Müller may truly enjoy watching people. Or she may be watching them for her gallery friend, which is to say for the customers. Either way, Asia's dazzling, energetic fashion has beaten her completely.

By the way, she is also one of the rare people in Basel's little VIP village willing to admit that something is "too hard."

Amy Toner

"It's really good. The level is really good, good galleries, masterpieces, good collections. I am really impressed by the quality of the pieces. It's one of the best. Unbelievable…"

When Amy says this, a few supporting devices are at work. Intermittent pauses, for instance, which give the verdict more penetration. Or a tone carrying a higher dose of sincerity.

"Much better than last year, completely different. It's really interesting mix when Asian artists next to European artists, young emerging artist next to established artist, secondary market next to primary market."

Praise, and no stinting on it.

Amy moves among the crowd, long straight legs, a lofty air. Her eyes carry a natural distance and an untouchable dignity. She comes across as someone who knows the game and could at any moment pull a classic checkbook out of her understated black shoulder bag and back the praise with action. Shrewd, independent, with a way of making you believe she can spot things fast — and don't assume we mean paintings, though paintings are no trouble either — she spots people. "Interesting artists"! What could be more thrilling, or better proof of a gallery owner's credentials, than finding someone with potential, especially a "rising artist"?

Amy runs a gallery in Luxembourg.

"I am really interested in following the evolution of artists, historical and new…make discoveries. I am running my own gallery. My goal here is to know what's going on in art market, what are new galleries in Asian market. It's interesting to catch the Asian vibe."

Sure enough. She has found someone. The joy of the discovery reaches everyone whose eyes so much as cross hers. She can barely stop herself from telling everyone she has found a new artist.

The long straight legs keep moving through the crowd. Three hours have gone by and you would never think she was tired. If anything, more confident.

But, "I can't tell you who they are."

This is business, rookie.

Besides the social praise and the thoughtfulness, there should be a touch of superiority now and then. Don't show off too much — you are not the artist, after all — a hint of "puzzlement" is enough.

"For sure they (asian market) like key pieces from established artist, big names, especially European artists. They are looking for quality work. it's difficult for mediocre to make discoveries. They prefer very established and key pieces."

See, you still leave a little room around the "praise" (in case the person across from you turns out to be some damned nouveau-riche customer), and you must never let it be mistaken for a broke nobody standing in front of an expensive artwork, swallowing hard and rolling her eyes.

Amy is not that kind of person.

"I never have budget when buying arts."

Vanessa Vainio

"The colors of the art here are very bright, very jumpy. They catch your eye easily."

Is that a compliment?

If you remember Emilia, so out of place a moment ago, you might frown without meaning to.

Especially if you know the speaker is from Lisson Gallery, an internationally known contemporary art gallery founded in 1967, with no shortage of true believers in New York and London.

Vanessa Vainio has worked for the gallery for a year and a half. The old house has picked its direction, and she and her colleagues have exactly one goal: sell it all.

Her job is installing the show. How the works are hung at the fair is entirely her call. She also has to wait on the pickier artists and make sure they are happy with every arrangement.

All in all, business keeps getting better.

"At other fairs it's mostly very seasoned collectors. In the US, for instance, there aren't that many young collectors, more of them are in their forties or fifties. But at Basel we have a lot of new customers, a lot of collectors with only a few years of collecting behind them. They're much younger."

Being young really is worth celebrating! Sincerely!

Think of Will's friends with five million dollars in their pockets, and the 22-year-old Asian "porcelain dolls" Emilia likes to watch.

"Art is really inspiring. It's beautiful and it's fun. I love the art world, it's full of creativity, and it gives me a great sense of accomplishment."

Of course there's a sense of accomplishment. Of course it's inspiring.

"Last year we sold very well, we basically sold out everything. This year we'll keep it up and work hard to reach more new clients."

Ma Huixin, Zheng Xiuyi

Ma Huixin sits in a meeting room at Swire Properties' headquarters, looking out over Hong Kong. On how to put a bit of an art halo on a property developer, she has her own playbook: "At Basel we don't buy art directly, but it lets us meet a lot of artists through this network and talk about working together later."

For a company, what matters most is taking part.

Or getting other people to take part in something you laid on yourself. Zheng Xiuyi is the director of the K11 Art Foundation, a Hong Kong nonprofit, and the curator of the K11 exhibition on Queen's Road. They have no booth at the convention center, which doesn't stop them from staging an event of their own on the side.

"At the Basel fair, galleries are mainly there to sell, but there are also booths for nonprofit organizations… We're here to show our direction too… None of our exhibitions are for sale, including the pieces in the K11 spaces in our malls in China. We only commission artists or borrow works from galleries. We absolutely do not sell anything."

True enough, K11's malls don't sell art. They sell other luxury goods.

"Why does art matter so much to Swire? For one thing, as a developer, so much of what we do is visual, so we want things to be beautiful. Art is a beautiful thing, a thing that can move people, and art is also part of our design. That's why you'll see quite a lot of art in our shopping malls, hotels and office buildings."

Though the artists might feel their work means something more complicated than the visual…

Ma Huixin also mentioned that the buildings need good air circulation. Anyway, as long as everyone likes it.

Zhang Zhongwei

"Right now we want more artists to come onto our VR platform, like having a booth online. Once these works, created or published, go live on our platform, viewers pay to download them, the site charges for them, and that's revenue."

Zhang Zhongwei, a Taiwanese woman over 1.8 meters tall, slim, with hair down to her waist, is at Art Basel Hong Kong to promote a product called HTC Vive Arts. To make her case she doesn't shy away from talking about death: "After our lives are gone, how does performance art go on existing? What VR and other new technologies can do is help carry the spirit of a life forward. A lot of artists are fascinated by VR because VR opens up so many possibilities."

Shixu Yimin

By 2020, Shixu Yimin's goal is to double the number of UBS Group employees in mainland China.

UBS is the world's largest corporate collector of art, and this is its fifth year sponsoring Basel. Shixu Yimin, in a blue Chanel-style tweed jacket, is UBS's president for the Asia-Pacific region.

This is the second year Basel and UBS have published The Art Basel and UBS Global Art Market Report, which notes that Asia accounts for 23% of global art trading volume and 15% of global private-collection trading volume, with China as the biggest "collector."

Over the past 50 years, UBS's business in Hong Kong and Greater China has risen in a straight line, like the art market here. An artist's work is a financial product and needs to be traded. Trading needs money, and money is the one thing banks never lack.

In Ms. Shixu's own vocabulary, of course, art gets described her way: "A lot of people measure a painting by how many dollars it's worth. But our clients don't buy art as an investment. They want to use art to express their individuality, their identity, and the values they want to pass to the next generation."

Right, poverty really may limit the imagination. What could express a set of values better than the identity these ten thousand people share — understanding art, buying art, and being willing to share art with friends?

"Everyone can appreciate art, there's no barrier to it. That's also why we keep supporting Basel, supporting artists, and want to share art. Hong Kong is a very busy, hardworking society, and people here have to learn to spend some time appreciating art and feeling art. In supporting art and culture, we're also educating the people of Hong Kong."

Wherever there are customers, there is never a shortage of praise.

Thomas Girst

Across the vast Hong Kong Convention and Exhibition Centre, BMWs do the job of ferrying VIPs around.

BMW's partnership with Basel is exclusive, and Thomas Girst stresses this above everything. "Basel definitely can't work with other car brands. The contract can only have our one car brand on it. It's exclusive." The BMW Group spokesman says they also want to pick out young artists and cook up a new process for manufacturing artistic achievement.

In the end they decided to support young artists who have neither money nor time, through a program called "BMW Art Journey," which involves "making art across multiple places." Put plainly: making art while sitting in a BMW.

New enough. Though what actually gets made remains to be seen.

"I think compared with other fairs, the people who come to our booth to look at the BMWs are very young, 100% of them. Europe's millennials are still a bit far from us, but China's millennials are starting to buy our cars. They have a lot of wealth and they're also very interested in luxury goods and high-end service. That's also why 'BMW Art Journey' picks young artists. We want everyone to know BMW is connected to young artists, to the young generation."

Once again. Being young really is worth celebrating! Sincerely!

Zheng Lin

Zheng Lin got thrown out.

"We've been at Art Basel Hong Kong for almost ten years. Before they ran the fair we were already their biggest gallery, 100 to 130 square meters every year, always the best locations. But these last two years there's a problem, because the main sector actually pushed us out and we can only apply for the curated sector. It's because of the one-veto rule, which lets small galleries pass judgment on a big gallery like us. These small galleries have their own agenda. Ai Weiwei used to work with them, and now Ai Weiwei is talking to us about working together, so they're unhappy and they veto us."

Now, unable to get into the main sector, this curator can show only one painter's work at Basel.

He keeps repeating, "I'm the most important gallery in Asia," which sounds a little embarrassing. He has the most important and most controversial artist, Ai Weiwei, in his hands, but his peers are unmoved.

He enjoys this art-world game and is doing everything he can to become the one who writes its rules. In contemporary art, whoever writes the world-shaking, era-opening new rules and new concepts is the one who can capture the hearts of the rich.

Every time a new school, a new -ism, a new perspective appears, the first person to stick their head out and say "I get it" has the best shot at a ticket into the game.

Zheng Lin worked this out early.

Otherwise he wouldn't have gone, more than 30 years ago, from young artist to businessman, heading from Hunan to Hainan in the 1990s and opening seven or eight branch companies overnight. Twenty-eight years later he runs Tang Contemporary Art, a well-known gallery in Asia with four locations across Thailand, Beijing and Hong Kong. The new Hong Kong space opened in H Queen's, the city's first building given over to art.

What he cares about is the power to set the terms of the conversation.

"Why call it a system of discourse power? Because whether a good artist wants to work with you doesn't depend on how well you sell. It depends on how much you can help him, solve his problems. However good an artist is, from the day he sets out on the artist's road he has one dream: to have his work shown in the world's top museums. So whoever can help him into the top museum system, that's who he plays with. Whoever can sell his work to the world's top collectors and collecting institutions, that's who he plays with. If you have that influence and that control, you're a superpower institution. Good artists want to work with you, then other artists all want to work with you, the best artists are all in your hands, and that naturally makes a chain, and you get to choose the artists. Once you have the power to choose, everything gets easy, because you choose the best artists, every show is the best show, collectors follow you, the best shows follow you, and the rest of the chain is perfect."

Right now that power has been thrown into disorder by 40 square meters of booth space.

In the past, in the main sector, Zheng Lin could take 120 square meters and show work by four or five artists. Now, in the curated sector, he can show one painter only, and if that painter doesn't sell, the several hundred thousand he put into the fair goes down the drain.

"The tip of the pyramid" — Zheng Lin likes that phrase.

"It took us 20 years to get to this scale. If we were still out cultivating young collectors, that would be a laughable thing to do. Contemporary art has always run on the idea of a pyramid. We climbed up from the bottom of the pyramid ourselves, so we know that only work with broad appeal is work ordinary people can take, because ordinary people's cultural cultivation can only take ordinary art. Low-end artists' work can't fetch high prices, a few thousand yuan, ten or twenty thousand, tens of thousands. Ordinary people can bear that price and can appreciate that ordinary taste, pretty landscapes, still lifes, portraits, beautiful women. But inside the category of art that's a low-end product, a low-end crowd."

"A new gallery has to scramble to find different collectors, bring new collectors in and fold them into its collector system. Some people think, 'I only have ten right now, I'm at a disadvantage, I need a hundred, a thousand collectors.' That way of thinking is laughable."

"Since we were founded at the end of 1997 we've been weeding out and screening collectors, from a thousand collectors down to two or three hundred, from two or three hundred down to twenty or thirty, cutting and refining the whole time. So at the low end, however much you sell, it only adds up to a little; however many people you cover, the volume is limited. But at the top of the pyramid, one collector's purchases in a year can equal what dozens of collectors buy. So an institution like ours should be competing worldwide for the share of the important institutions and collectors, not cultivating small collectors."

Zheng Lin, in leather shoes printed with white letters, a black leather jacket and a GUCCI bag under his arm, walks into Ai Weiwei's solo exhibition space.

With every step, another pair of hands reaches out to trade business cards with him.

He looks like a man who can afford to be arrogant.

But you live under other people's eaves. Shut out of the main sector, he still has to show up at Basel. Even if those small galleries' envy has wrecked his business and his company's, he can't afford to be absent.

Ten thousand people, gathering once a year. This is business at the tip of the pyramid.

The public, of course, is only fit to stand at the base and look up. Basel was open to the public March 29-31, but this circle's core figures had already appeared on the 27th and 28th, at the VIP preview, wine glasses clinking. By the time the doors opened to the public, not one of the pieces worth buying was left.

Tom Wolfe saw through the trick long ago: "So far as the game of art achievement is concerned, no matter how glorious the attendance figures in a museum's annual report, no matter how many students visit, how many tour groups come through, how many families come on outings, with a few intellectuals mixed in, the public is really nothing but a crowd of gawkers craning their necks at the show, or star-chasers. The public only gets a notice after the whole thing is over."

Cover image: tate, healthylivingandtravel

Note: "Alicia Rey" in this article is a pseudonym.