CM: Could you tell us a little bit about the profile of some of the corporate collections you have advised, either specifically or anonymously?
EdeB: HSBC China, which we are still working with, had a very nice collection in which they focused on second-tier Chinese contemporary art. Let me define that: the first tier would be, say, the top ten Chinese contemporary artists internationally recognized and purchased in auctions at Sotheby’s and Christies, so Zhang Huan, Zhang Xiaogang, and Zhou Tiehai — various members of that 90s group. HSBC chose to go through the second tier of purely Mainland artists. Price levels did not count. There was no three-dimensional [work], but photography and painting were included, with a preponderance for photography and, interestingly enough for a bank, various figurative works — contemplative though obviously not political. I’d say in about five to ten years it will be a very weighty collection. For now, it is a good investment and a very honorable collection.
And we are working with Bosch China, who is buying under a certain price point and focusing on young artists but not emerging artists. There is a difference between emerging and young, “young” being not-yet-established graduates from the last two years.
CM: What do you think of the problem of balancing know-how with transparency? For instance, commissions are a continually fraught area in the art world and nowhere more than in China.
EdeB: It goes back to what is the definition of an art dealer and what makes someone call himself an expert. When I first came here there were very, very few experts and a lot of people that dealt. I think that China itself has a lot of art dealers who merely put two people together because of the networking. The networking is so abundant that it’s a commodity. So therefore you dealt with a lot of dealers.
CM: So how should a collector measure the success of an art advisor, particularly from the perspective of a corporate collection?
EdeB: You have to spend a tremendous amount of time with an art advisor to really know. It would be as if — and this is incredibly simplified — you were to have a wedding dress made for you. You have to have the exterior knowledge of the professionals with ability but you also have to spend enough time with the person to be assured that they have put together a recipe that works for each different individual. Art advisors have to be attached to the individual in order to meet that particular client’s needs. At that point, I do think that you should have collections that have different areas of focus, whether it be age or area or medium or subject, and that depends on the time invested.
You really should ask them very pertinent questions immediately. You can almost give them examples. You could say, “This is my financial project. What would you do with this?” — almost like a hedge fund. “I’ll give you 20 years, what do you want to do with that? I don’t care about the time slot. I want this value.” It should be a dialogue that is really lengthy.
They must also be someone who you feel inherently you trust. There is nothing wrong with someone who is financially aware. In the past, with my family’s experience, I liked being with somebody financially aware of value and the future value of the acquisition, but at the same time very passionate.
CM: This actually leads into my next question, which might be the other end of the whole process: how do you manage a company wishing to either cash in on its investment or wanting to downsize or completely divest its collection?
EdeB: Actually, I have not been approached in that manner. I have known acquisitions, but I have not had the experience in China as yet of companies trying to divest, which leads you probably to the subject of, say, the Ullens Collection.
CM: Yes.
EdeB: Guy Ullens is a friend of the family. I don’t think his original idea was to divest so quickly. I think when you get into buying a big collection very rapidly and creating an activity, such as this art center, which is very ambitious and very “Beijing in the 2007/2008/2009 ‘thing,’” there were some glitches…He ended up going with Sotheby’s and doing something that typically works better for the Chinese — loud, labeled, a short guarantee — instead of a quiet collector-to-collector private sale.
CM: Then what is your perspective on the place of auction houses in the Chinese market? From my perspective, it is far more important in China than, say, other parts of the world, even major art centers like London, Paris, or New York.
EdeB: I think it’s very, very important. You know, from early 2000 up until 2008, there were a lot of Chinese auction houses; international auction houses, as you know, were not allowed to function in Mainland China, and they still are not quite as embedded [as their Chinese counterparts]. The Chinese are very conservative. They take a long time to feel that they should invest in something, in the unknown. So there were a lot of auction houses, Poly and other auction houses, that were doing very well. But it was sort of an old boys’ club — “okay, you guys can take care of mine, too.”
I think the international market, driven by certain Mainland auction houses, and the results that they’ve made in the last two or three years in Hong Kong have been outrageous and incredibly popular. I think this is helping nurture the market irresponsibly.
CM: Which leads me to ask you to address what is more commonly seen as an issue, and some people would say a problem: the situation where clients, after making various promises to galleries and artists, suddenly put up recently purchased artworks for auction and “turn” [speculatively resell] them, thereby pushing up the market to perhaps undesirable levels, because they are unsustainable.
EdeB: Yes, I have seen a tremendous amount of that from 2004 through October 2007. We actually have an agreement with our clients that they cannot turn the product within a period of time. Personally, the clients we work with have been very upfront about their collecting, so we have not had the unfortunate situation where an artist starts to arrange for breaking a product.
