Wednesday March 27 at the beginning of the afternoon, when the Art Basel fair had just opened its doors to a few thousand hand-picked international VIPs (the list and exact number remain jealously guarded), the aisles were already full of a motley crowd of happy few, eager to discover what the some 242 galleries from 40 countries had chosen to show this year.
THE “buzz”, as people in the sector like to say, seemed indeed to be back; and this, despite the relative economic gloom in China and Hong Kong. In 2023, sales in the art market increased by 9% in China, for an estimated amount of $12.2 billion. China now occupies second place in the global art market (19%), behind the United States and ahead of the United Kingdom. And, according to a vast study published by Art Basel and its sponsor UBS, it is to the new generation of collectors that the market owes its resilience.
“In my case, it was my mother who suggested I start collecting [de l’art contemporain]. But it is also an activity that many of my friends, most of them artists, have recently adopted with passion, says Bonnie Chen, the Chinese actress and top model turned director, who wanders from one gallery to another, randomly whatever catches her eye, in the early hours of the fair. So it seems natural to me to give it my turn.” She mentions very active networks of artists, gallery owners and private collectors located both in Beijing and Shanghai but also in Chengdu, Shenzhen… “Many young artists exchange their paintings with each other and several galleries have been born from groups of artists who join forces”, adds Silvia Sun, of the Don gallery in Shanghai, who affirms that the artistic ecosystem in China is changing. Her youngest client is 22 years old.
Young collectors club
Alice Lin, 27, from mainland China, studied in the UK and currently works in finance in Hong Kong. She came to Art Basel with a small group of smart-casual friends who mark her as the most serious collector among them. She began her collection with two works by Damien Hirst. “They were just lithographs, she specifies, purchased online. » Since then, she has significantly expanded her knowledge and network. She even set up a young collectors’ club with two friends, which has a branch in London and one in Hong Kong, “to help young aspiring collectors build a collection with taste, quality and potential”, she explains in front of the stand of the Beijing Commune gallery, established for twenty years in the heart of the 798 artistic district of Beijing. Alice Lin is therefore part of what UBS, the bank which is the historic sponsor of Art Basel, calls the “New Generation” (for “new generation”), a necessarily heterogeneous group of newcomers to the contemporary art market.
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