The third Art021 Shanghai Contemporary Art Fair, which closed on Sunday, has become the largest of the city’s burgeoning art events. This year’s move to the Shanghai Exhibition Centre allowed it to expand to include 75 galleries, up from 54 last year and 29 in 2013. “We don’t have an ideal number, but we are more than 25% international,” said the fair’s co-founder Zhou Ying, adding that the aim is “to keep a balance as a local fair but with international galleries to keep the business fresh”.
Newcomers included Gagosian Gallery, joining its first mainland fair since Art Beijing a decade ago, said the director of Gagosian Hong Kong Li Xi. The gallery was not able to confirm sales, but Li did say that they had met potential new clients. “To a gallery, this is the most important thing, you need a connection. Even if we sold everything, it is less important, new friends are the most valuable.” The gallery brought mostly newer works by its top names, including Nam June Paik, Thomas Houseago, Sterling Ruby and Dan Colen.
Marian Goodman Gallery, returning to 021 for a second year, reported meeting mostly Chinese collectors, “but also a lot from the rest of Asia, including Hong Kong and Korea, which is up from last year,” a spokeswoman said. “We continue to have a great conversation with new collectors and those we met last year. It is becoming the most important fair in the Mainland.”
Fair highlights included the small but popular public installation art series, particularly Liu Wei’s jagged glass sculpture Puzzle on an outdoor terrace, and Xavier Veilhan’s wooden, life-size Brian Eno statue, which surveyed the main hall from the stairs. Zhang Peili’s A standard, uplifting, and distinctive circle, along with its sound system, a microphone revolving around a selection of antique radios, was a crowd pleaser at Beijing’s Boers-Li Gallery, selling to a southern Chinese private museum. Images of Tao Aimin’s untitled assemblages of vintage Chinese washboards, at Beijing’s Ink Studio, dominated WeChat and all three editions sold to Shanghai-based collectors for 68,000 RMB each.
Chinese galleries reported wildly divergent sales, some selling out their booths while adjacent neighbors moved few if any works. Beijing Red Gate Gallery founder Brian Wallace reported excellent energy despite selling only two paintings as of day three: Jiang Weitao’s A2015 No12 for 45,000 RMB, and Zhou Jinrong’s Landscape Taihe Palace, for 20,000 RMB. The 20 younger or smaller galleries in the 1+1 section on the mezzanine saw particularly tepid traffic. International galleries meanwhile described more consistently middling sales. The biggest complaint was that the collector ranks have stayed static while competition has expanded.