A work by the Chinese artist Huang Yong Ping was loaned to an exhibition at the Walker Art Center in Minneapolis and then pulled from the show following a dispute over restoration costs. It was sold at auction in New York a few months later where it set a new auction record for the artist.
The Walker borrowed Yong Ping’s Da Xian-The Doomsday, 1997, an installation consisting of three large fibreglass bowls filled with expired food products, two watercolour drawings and three photographs, from the Pisces Trust, a Geneva-based art investment fund. The Pisces Collection has been assembled by Simon de Pury, chairman of the auction house Phillips de Pury & Company, on behalf of a private owner.
The loan was negotiated for a Huang Yong Ping retrospective at the Walker (16 October 2005-15 January 2006), the first ever devoted to the artist, and also for a subsequent tour of the show to Mass MoCA (where the exhibition runs until 25 February) and the Vancouver Art Gallery. (There are now talks for the retrospective to travel to Beijing).
However, two days before the show had completed its run at the Walker, the installation was removed by the Pisces Trust. It was then consigned for sale at Phillips de Pury in New York on 11 May 2006 where it sold to a telephone bidder for $168,000 (est $50,000-$70,000).
Restoration dispute
Philippe Vergne, chief curator and deputy director of the Walker, says he first saw Yong Ping’s Da Xian-The Doomsday at Art et Public in Geneva. “The gallery told us to contact Phillips de Pury and we arranged the loan through the auction house. The installation was shipped to Minneapolis. It was accompanied by a courier representing the Pisces Trust. When we unpacked the installation, we noticed a small crack around the edge of one of the bowls; the Pisces Trust courier informed us the crack was pre-existing so we documented the damage and sent a report to Simon de Pury asking him if we should restore it.”
In a letter dated 15 December 2005, Mr de Pury, acting on behalf of the Pisces Trust, agreed to the restoration says Mr Vergne. However Mr de Pury appeared to have second thoughts about the loan, saying: “The piece seems to be far too fragile to continue on its tour. Therefore I kindly ask you NOT to send it on to Mass MoCA, or to any of its subsequent venues.”
“Once the piece had been restored, I contacted Mr de Pury again and asked him where we should send the invoice for the work,” says Mr Vergne. “His assistant said: ‘Don’t send it anywhere, you must pay for it yourself.’” Mr Vergne says he then suggested the cost be divided by the Walker and the Pisces Trust but this offer was rejected. “We were told that if we didn’t pay, the work would be withdrawn. For the sake of the artist, we decided to meet the entire cost ourselves,” says Mr Vergne.
Despite this, on 13 January 2006 he received an email from Simon de Pury, advising him that the installation was being withdrawn from the exhibition. The Walker was obliged to remove it from the retrospective and ship it to Phillips de Pury in New York.
“I was very upset about this,” says Mr Vergne. “We had already promised the piece to other museums on the exhibition tour so we had to find a work to substitute it. People who behave like this are not interested in art or artists. They are only interested in making money. Museums are powerless to prevent these abuses,” says Mr Vergne.
“This is a bad precedent for institutions which take the intellectual and financial risk of assembling exhibitions of this nature. The work was documented and published in our exhibition catalogue, we brought scholarship to the field, but, in the end, this did not benefit the artist at all.”
On 11 December 2006, over a year after the restoration dispute began, Phillips de Pury sent the Walker payment for the conservation of the bowl.
In an email to The Art Newspaper, Simon de Pury said: “I fully sympathise with Philippe Vergne’s frustration that this work was only shown in Minneapolis and was not sent on the travelling tour.”
“This was the result of a mistake that had nothing to do with Philippe Vergne or the Walker Art Center; the owner of the work did not realise it was meant to go on a tour after Minneapolis. The work would never have been lent in the first place had the owner been aware of this. Its physical nature should have enticed one, from a conservation point of view, to restrict sending it to too many different venues.”
“Whether we are artists, curators, collectors, dealers or auctioneers, our prime responsibility has to be the physical integrity of the works that we have the privilege to handle.”
The Pisces collection
The Pisces Trust was set up in Geneva to administer a contemporary art collection, assembled by Simon de Pury, on behalf of a private client.
Interviewed by the New York collector Adam Lindemann for his book “Collecting Contemporary” (Taschen, 2006), Mr de Pury said: “The Pisces Collection was a collector who approached me in the late Nineties, who wanted to build a collection of art focusing on the last 20 years...We bought very actively for several years and then the owner of the Pisces Collection wanted to see whether there was the reality of the market behind it. So between November 2003 and November 2004...we sold 30-40% of the works [at Phillips].”
In a 2003 catalogue of the Pisces Collection, Mr de Pury identifies acquisitions by Andreas Gursky, Paul McCarthy, Jeff Koons, Wim Delvoye, Fischli & Weiss, Damien Hirst, Thomas Struth, Mariko Mori, and Richard Prince, among others.
In 2002, a selection of work from the Pisces Collection went on public display at the Fürstenberg palace in Donaueschingen in the German state of Baden-Würtemberg.
o For commentary, p30; for a piece on museums and the market by Robert Storr, director of this year’s Venice Biennale, p50
Originally appeared in The Art Newspaper as 'Installation withdrawn from retrospective, then sold at auction'