Red hot art scene in China

Not bad, $2.11 million dollars for a piece of artwork made by a Chinese artist. Since the value of art has very little to do with the production cost, who makes art and where it is made, become irrelevant as long as there is demand for it. This is great news for the Chinese artists. If we took the cost of living into account, $2.11 million is far more than $2.11 million that Damien Hirst gets.

There are now a lot of millionaires and billionaires in China who are eager to buy modern art to flaunt their social status, which pushes the value of Chinese art upwards. So, even the Western collectors would want to join the frenzy since they can stand to make a lot of money.

The art scene in Japan, in comparison, seems quite boring. The reason for this, I suspect, is because they don’t allow the gap between the rich and the poor to get so extreme. In some ways, the art world thrives on that socioeconomic discrepancy. The world’s billionaire list is now dominated by Chinese and Indians. There is no Japanese in the top 100 this year.