Elisabeth de Brabant came to Shanghai in 2004 and soon began working in the then nascent M50 art district. In 2008 she established her own art advisory firm and gallery. Here de Brabant talks with Randian about growing up in a family of New York collectors, the nature of galleries and the problems of the China art market.
Editorial Note: The following transcript has been amended since publication.
Chris: Elisabeth, thank you for agreeing to speak with Randian. Could you please start by giving us an idea of how you became involved in art and eventually setting up your firm?
Elisabeth: Thank you to Randian for inviting me. I have been surrounded by great artworks all my life. I come from three generations of art collectors, art donors, and benefactors to such institutions as MoMA in New York, the Tate Modern, the Victoria & Albert Museum, and the Seattle Art Museum, to name a few. So I was brought up having a heightened sensibility to the environment. I went to Columbia University and graduated in art history and comparative literature, but I still felt frustrated as an artist. So I joined the Central St. Martin’s Masters Degree program. That was an amazing experience, but one that brought me to understand and feel that I was a better visual expert than artist.
I have always collected art and I have always been interested in museums — museum programming fascinated me. Philippe de Montebello, at the time the director of the Metropolitan Museum of New York, was a friend of the family and is well recognized for having revolutionized museum programming. So I probably developed the passion from that. I did some collecting and I pretty soon decided that I wanted to be the one in my family that actually got more involved with art, which happened when I arrived here.
CM: So when did you come to Shanghai?
EdeB: I came to Shanghai in 2004. I immediately was fascinated by the “cowboy” element of the Chinese contemporary art world in Beijing, Hangzhou, and Shanghai. These were the days of Zhou Tiehai, Yue Minjun, Zhang Huan, just to mention a few, who were really important pioneers of the Chinese contemporary art movement. There were very few art galleries at the time in China, and some of them were very inconsistent. As I began to collect my first pieces of Chinese contemporary art, I got involved with an auction for the American Women’s Club, which brought me into the Shanghai art scene. The auction was organized with Sami Wafa from Art Scene, and through that experience Sami became my business partner. I wanted to understand better what Chinese people considered “good” art, what the Chinese contemporary art movement was, and the financial value of it versus, say, the European or American contemporary collections that I had been brought up with.
CM: You avoid the tag of “art dealer” or “art gallery”; so how would you define what you do?
EdeB: I have to say that I have an allergy to art dealers or marchands d’art. There are people I have met who inspire me, and those are the individuals who are more intellectually passionate — more intuitively passionate — about what they do and how they can help, rather than just selling a product. Unfortunately, I think galleries internationally have become very much product-based, very much speculative, very much sick. It’s a personal issue. I come from a belief that art should be something that is cultural, a reflection of society and of our times.
CM: That leads to another question. How do you distinguish, in the Chinese context, between art and luxury goods? For instance, to what extent does corporate art investment fit within a particular class of commodity for the sake of portfolio diversity, and to what extent is it a matter of branding? Or is it simply just another luxury commodity, that is, a matter of desire and indulgence?
EdeB: Well, I think that, for various different corporations, originally it was purely the next obvious step in the mentality of greater importance, greater power, and greater purchasing power. Therefore you found individuals who bought in a way that I would say parallels Zhou Tiehhai, Ai Weiwei, and Zhang Huan, in the dialogue of “I have these cars outside. I have these expensive liquors. I have my assistant doing all of my work, because I am so famous and you should invest in me.” So I do believe that now, after about ten years of solidly Chinese Mainland investors buying, we can see it is because of this self-important show of having money. But now the corporate decisions have become more mellow, more mature and more sophisticated. We are seeing in corporate purchases more focus in the type of purchases. There is actually a personal taste, which is becoming more sophisticated, but at the same time more defined so that you don’t have copycat collections. A lot of Chinese collectors like to have the essential top five or ten top Chinese artists in their collections, which shows absolutely no variety and no diversity, nor any personal taste. For the last three to five years however, I have had the pleasure of seeing more diversity and a more sophisticated product, so therefore less of a luxury approach and more of a cultural approach.
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.
I had an instance in 2005. We had the winner of the Dragonair Emerging Chinese Artist Award, a painter. She was a year out of art school in Hangzhou, and for a solo show she got USD 10,000 from Dragonair. We made a catalogue and sold almost all of her works. There were absolutely no problems, and she is actually very well-known now. She signed across the street with another gallery who pushed her up, and we kept her price at what we thought a first-year student would get, despite the fact that she was the winner. We had her at four, five or six [thousand] USD. They put her at USD 23,000, and then put her immediately in an auction. This girl, for the last three years, has gone nowhere; she’s lost. She’s totally lost, because she stopped selling at that particular price. Her work isn’t that brilliant and it was quite limited in its scope; she was unfortunately representing that period of 2000—2008 of “I want to be an artist. It’s cool to be an artist. I’m going to make money. I want to be number one and I’m going to take what I can get right now.” I saw recently that her work was put up for auction again, but now her prices are back to where they began.
CM: So rather than saying that the market recovered from 2008, you’d say it matured?
EdeB: I think 2008 was the best thing that could have happened. I think it made a huge division, sort of a massive attrition of those who pretend to be artists, the wannabes, and those who are really original artists. The fake prices, either by very well-known artists or not-so-well-known artists, were stopped [by the crash]. It really did give the market a wake-up call. Since then it has matured in a healthier way.
Notwithstanding that, there are exceptions, such as Ai Weiwei and his situation. He has never known so much European and American recognition, and you do ask the question, are his media outbursts and his radical beliefs making his art, or is it art making his media? So you really have certain exceptions that are going to continue in the way they have been for many years. But on the whole, I think it’s healthier.
CM: Art funds of course also took a major hit in 2008, not only in China but all around the world, but in China they appeared to have recovered very strongly, in popularity if not necessarily in performance (which is very hard to measure objectively). What is your perspective on the art fund — is it a general term of description that covers up the fact that there are a variety of different concepts applied here, or what’s going on?
EdeB: I absolutely agree with you that art funds have become sort of the new trend. Whereas before, it was sort of “I have my own building and now I have my own museum,” it’s been replaced with “I have an art fund or a corporation doing art funds.” It is the new flavor.
How do I feel about it? I am involved with a few of them, but they are individuals that truly adore art and have been doing art funds for many, many years overseas. So my take on it is that it is a slightly more mature dialogue, but the same way generally.
CM: So what, in your opinion, are the major problems with the art market in China? What does it still need? What needs to change?
EdeB: What would be amazing, if I had a magic wand, would be to create an exchange between international art professors coming to the Mainland fine arts universities and departments. I would not only have the old boys’ system, which will always exist because it is part of the Chinese culture, but freshen it up, open it up a little bit. So I think you start with the students, giving them more of an opportunity to have an exposure [to international art dialogue] without having to travel to new places. Start there.
And it would be lovely to have some very new, government-run and government-funded art programs. I’d love to see [more] programming in museums and not just have these private museums that are more or less “night galleries,” ways in which someone can show his art collection with a view to selling it at a later date.
I would love to see more of a cultural aspect from the government working with non-profit charities; I’m looking at ten years ahead where there is no division between public and private.
I would like to see more video (I think video is still young and undeveloped) and installation. That is a little bit more evolved, because I have been looking at the same installation dialogue as for the last ten years.
And there are tremendous artisans in the Chinese market. It would be amazing to see contemporary porcelain. The Koreans are doing very interesting porcelain in contemporary art. It would be nice to be able to go back into woodwork craftsmanship. Chinese contemporary art is getting back into Chinese ink. I think it will happen in time, but it would be nice to see more usage of their ancestry and different crafts.
CM: Do you have one or two predictions for the next twelve months?
EdeB: Predictions: I am actually looking into more pan-Asian art. I think that Vietnamese, Thai, and Indian art — and from Arab nations too — actually have developed very, very well. I am trying slowly to interest collectors and funds into more pan-Asian dialogue, and that’s my prediction – more diversity and more cultural diversity.
