The Great China Sale

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There may not yet be any discerning Chinese collectors in the model of the influential Saatchi. But that's unlikely to affect the demand for modern Chinese art, since many of the newly minted millionaires simply don't have anywhere else to put their cash. "It's what I call the panic of new money," says Zhao, 45, who manages the venerable Courtyard Gallery. "The government is killing the property market, the stock market has been up and down like a bouncing ball, and people don't trust it. They can only buy so many Mercedes. They have to put their money somewhere, and right now that means contemporary art."

Such speculative interest could evaporate overnight if the market cools, of course. But that's where the non-Chinese buyers come in. The international contemporary-art market is highly cyclical — many would say current prices are at all-time highs — but there remains a core group of wealthy art collectors who will be comparatively unaffected by external conditions. It's the buyers from that group who are now turning their attention to China, argues banker and avid collector Carl Kostyal. "About 10 to 20 collectors are at the leading edge of contemporary art globally," says Kostyal. "They are already buying in China and have been for a year or so. Then there is another group of 200 to 300 for whom this buying is bringing China into their sights." Kostyal, who recently flew into Beijing for two days of gallery tours and visits to artists' studios, believes that a larger group will soon begin to buy, further bolstering the market.

Skyrocketing prices have left galleries and dealers scrambling to keep up with the demand. Sotheby's held its first sale of purely Chinese contemporary art in New York City only last March. A dozen or so foreign galleries from New York, London and Hong Kong have opened branches in Beijing and Shanghai in the past 19 months. Meanwhile, scores of local galleries have sprung up.

Inevitably, the flood of money has left some members of the art world in China unhappy. "Modern art in China has become a monster," says respected collector Guan Yi. "People's attention is no longer focused on the art itself but [on] what kind of return they will get on their investment, like the stock market."

The contrast between such sentiments and the attitudes of the current crop of leading artists, like Zhang Xiaogang, Zhu Wei and Fang Lijun, couldn't be starker. Mostly now in their 40s, many of the artists suffered through the tail end of the Cultural Revolution. The cultural flowering that followed in the '80s was another casualty of the Tiananmen Square massacre in 1989. Many artists left the country. Now back, they're thrilled at being rewarded instead of hounded for expressing their feelings in their work. Fundamental issues like politics, ideology and spirituality remain important themes. Images of Mao Zedong, the Red Guards and other icons of the recent past are central to the works that have brought many of them fame.

For the young artists just breaking into the scene, such images have little resonance, except as tools to raise their prices, says gallery director Zhao. "To them it's like being in manufacturing — they are cranking out a commodity," he says with a sigh. "But then, at prices like these, you can hardly blame them."