By KELLY CROW
Hong Kong
"Expansion" is a six-foot-long, multicolored abstract created by Chinese painter Chu Teh-Chun in 2006. The painting's title could also sum up the ambition of Art HK: The Hong Kong International Art Fair, where the work sold Wednesday to a Chinese buyer for around $900,000.
Kelly Crow on Lunch Break reports from Hong Kong on that city's major contemporary art fair, Art HK, which Art Basel has bought a controlling stake in.
Since its kickoff five years ago, Art HK has grown into Asia's pre-eminent art fair, drawing over 60,000 people a year into a warren of booths that spread across a pair of vast halls in the Hong Kong Convention and Exhibition Centre.
European Pressphoto Agency'I Didn't Notice What I Am Doing,' pictured here, by Sun Yuan and Peng Yu., on view at the fair.
This year, at least 700 galleries applied for the fair's 266 slots, said fair director Magnus Renfrew. Several dealers, like Shanghai's Pearl Lam and Paris's Emmanuel Perrotin, waited until fair week to debut their new gallery outposts in Hong Kong. Luxury brands Veuve Clicquot and Shanghai Tang threw late-night parties to coincide with the event.
All of it dovetails with Hong Kong's long-term plans to become a year-round, art-selling hub to rival London or New York—an aspiration wedded to Asia's wealth boom.
There's still an unpredictable energy to Art HK, as Western galleries—who make up about half the fair's dealers—anxiously try to nail down the shifting tastes and spending habits of newer Asian collectors, who are the real power players here.
The mood has been mostly upbeat. Few booths are sold out entirely, but major galleries like Pace are reporting steady sales for works priced under $1 million, thanks mainly to buyers from Asia and Europe. Dealers said at least 300 Australian collectors signed up to attend, happy to have a fair comparatively close to home.
On the other hand, American collectors, who typically flock to major art fairs world-wide, have proven surprisingly scarce. Dealers reasoned that Americans might have gotten their fix at Frieze, a London fair that debuted its own New York edition two weeks ago. Others are also likely saving up for next month's Art Basel, the Swiss contemporary art fair whose owner MCH Group recently bought a majority ownership stake in Art HK. (Next spring, Art HK will be renamed Art Basel Hong Kong.) The fair closes Sunday.
On Wednesday, a reliable group of well-known collectors turned out for the fair's VIP preview, including François Pinault, Christie's owner; Uli Sigg, a former Swiss ambassador to China; Rudy Tseng, a former Walt Disney executive from Taiwan and Richard Chang, the Beijing director of investment firm Tira Holdings.
The galleries also worked to make first-timers feel comfortable. London's Annely Juda Gallery taped up a sign in Mandarin offering to divulge prices for its offerings—something dealers usually just whisper to prospective buyers on a case-by-case basis. Dealer David Juda also placed a small sticker shaped like a red dot beside David Hockney's $950,000 painting of a log, "Felled Totem, September 8th, 2009," to indicate that the work in that booth had already found a buyer. Mr. Juda doesn't apply stickers at other fairs, but he said, "I heard it was a good idea here to reassure people when works are sold."
Plenty of galleries dangled new works by Asian artists in their rosters. In one of the most elaborate displays, the Gagosian Gallery added a carpeted side room to its booth to showcase a pair of new pencil drawings of trees by Zeng Fanzhi, a Chinese painter who is better known for his colorful portraits of men wearing white masks. The gallery used the other walls of this antechamber to offer up paintings by Pablo Picasso, Alberto Giacometti and Claude Monet. The lofty comparison may have helped: Mr. Zeng's drawings sold on the first day for an undisclosed sum.
London dealer Stephane Custot, who sold the Chu Teh-Chun abstract, also brought a $2.2 million Picasso musketeer painting, 1969's "Bust of a Man." But so far, he said passersby had gravitated to their hometown favorite: "It's easier here to sell a Chu Teh-Chun than a Picasso."
Mr. Tseng, the Taiwanese collector, said he thinks the ongoing strength of this fair will lie in artistic mix of East and West. This time, he said he liked German painter Gerhard Richter's wall-size print "Stripe" at Marian Goodman's booth. He also raved about Beijing art duo Sun Yuan and Peng Yu's life-size sculptures of dinosaurs and rhinoceroses, which stood, like a scattered herd, in several fair booths. "See? Everything about this fair is getting bigger," he added.
Write to Kelly Crow at kelly.crow@wsj.com
A version of this article appeared May 18, 2012, on page D4 in the U.S. edition of The Wall Street Journal, with the headline: The Next Global Art Powerhouse.
![[ARENA LEDE]](http://si.wsj.net/public/resources/images/WK-BB941_ARENA__G_20120517175814.jpg)
