By KELLY CROW

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Daniel Buren, 'Photo-souvenir: From Three Windows, 5 Colours for 252 Places, Work in Situ'

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.

Art Basel Art Basel co-directors Annette Schönholzer and Marc Spiegler

This year’s Hong Kong International Art Fair is a week away, but its organizers are already focused on 2013.

That’s when the event — Asia’s biggest and most lucrative art fair — will be reborn as the Hong Kong edition of Art Basel. It will be held May 23 to 26 and remain at the city’s convention center.

Associated Press

Paul McCarthy’s ‘Daddies Tamato Ketchup Inflatable 2007′ at the entrance to the Hong Kong International Art Fair in 2011.

Marc Spiegler, co-director of Art Basel and sister event Art Basel Miami Beach, the biggest art fair in the U.S., said there will be “significant differences from this year” but declined to share details. MCH Group, which owns both Art Basel fairs, bought a 60% stake in Hong Kong’s fair last May.

Exhibitors, however, will get some idea of what’s changing on June 11, when Basel releases information on the selection committee and makes its 2013 applications available.

Among galleries’ concerns: that Art Basel Hong Kong will feature the same names that pop up in the U.S. and Europe. That won’t happen, Mr. Spiegler said.

“Every gallery has to apply every time to every show,” he said. “We want [to avoid] shows that all look the same. There will never be a get-in-once, get-in-three times concept, though that would make our lives simpler.”

Magnus Renfrew, the Hong Kong art fair director who is now Art Basel’s director in Asia, said the fair is committed to keeping a 50-50 split between Western and Asian (which they define as including the entire Asia-Pacific region as well as the Middle East and Turkey) galleries.

WOW Productions - Magnus Renfrew

What patrons can expect is to see top-selling Asian artists and galleries appear in Miami and Basel, similar to Art Basel Miami, which raised the profiles of Latin American artists, who were then invited to Switzerland. “There is cross-pollination,” Mr. Spiegler said.

In an effort to cultivate Asian collectors, Art Basel has hired VIP relations officers in Shanghai, Singapore and Sydney, and is seeking representatives in Beijing and Taipei.

“This kind of high-touch approach is important,” said Mr. Renfrew.

While the May date is conveniently near Hong Kong’s spring auctions, it’s not ideal for overseas collectors and galleries, who are already hopping from Frieze in New York to Art Basel in Switzerland this time of year.

Mr. Spiegler cited the logistics of booking Hong Kong’s convention center, which is packed with trade shows and other events in the spring. “This is an issue we’ve been working on,” he said.

Follow Alexandra A. Seno on Twitter @alexandraseno