Some people in the world of contemporary Chinese art think Howard Farber has gone mad.
Consider this: China's buyers are flexing their muscles, Connecticut hedge fund managers are unleashing their millions at auction houses, prices are rising inexorably, and the curators of western museums are finally accepting there may be something to the brouhaha about contemporary Chinese art.
And yet Farber is offloading 44 works - three quarters of his remaining collection - purchased over the past 12 years. He sold 35 works in June at auctioneers Phillips de Pury, including a Zeng Fanzhi painting acquired by British collector Charles Saatchi for GBP860,000 (HK$13.7 million).
The sale on Saturday, to be held at Phillips de Pury in London, reads like a who's who of contemporary Chinese artists, including Ai Weiwei, Cai Guoqiang, Gu Wenda, Yang Shaobin and Yue Minjun. With its mixture of paintings, photographs and sculptures, it may also be a barometer of where the broader market is headed.
The auction includes the triptych Mao AO by Wang Guangyi (estimate GBP500,000-GBP700,000) that was partly credited with the temporary closure of the 1989 China/Avant-Garde exhibition in Beijing. Farber (below) says the painting will spark interest. 'That triptych is a seminal, iconic, historic, politically charged painting. Whoever buys it owns the history of Chinese contemporary art.'
As an early collector, New York-based Farber occupies a curious place. He's not well-known like the Belgian Baron Guy Ullens or Uli Sigg, the former Swiss ambassador to China. He never had the financial firepower Kent Logan of Montgomery Securities brought to the market. He wasn't one of the Hong Kong or Beijing-based expatriates who began collecting in the early 1990s and now sit on accidental fortunes. But the one-time real estate investor had an established pedigree in another area of collecting.
Beginning in the early 1970s, Farber assembled a collection of American modernist painting that embraced heavyweights such as Georgia O'Keefe and Max Weber. After he sold an O'Keefe in 1990 to finance a home purchase, he began to sell the collection, a process that ended in 2003. Along the way, he stumbled into Chinese art. On holiday in Hong Kong in 1995, the collector walked into a gallery - he thinks it was Johnson Chang Tsong-zung's Hanart TZ Gallery - and was mesmerised. Farber bought nothing that day, but he was consumed by zeal greater than any he had experienced in his earlier collecting. Once an adherent to the rigours of provenance, he plunged into the relatively undocumented melee that was contemporary Chinese art.