An art fair is the art world's circus, and there was much razzmatazz and tight organisation at last week's Hong Kong International Art Fair, or ARTHK10, which kept the crowds rolling in. Organisers counted 46,115 visitors, an increase of 65 per cent from last year's event.
With 155 galleries exhibiting, collectors from the region and further afield flew in for both the fair and the many auction houses that co-ordinated their seasonal sales. It is difficult to pin down exact sales figures, but many of the galleries said there was great interest in both high-end and niche areas, with collectors buying carefully. Taiwanese collectors, for example, snapped up the compelling video work and exact optical kinetic pieces by rising star Wu Chi-tsung of Taiwan's Chi-Wen Gallery.
Alternatively, the abundance of Damien Hirst butterflies at the fair suggested a bin-end sale offering just for the Asian market, after recent muted overseas auction prices for the artist. I suspect buyers were not persuaded, and much of Hirst's work was returned - though The Inescapable Truth, a formaldehyde work by Hirst that created much excitement, was sold by White Cube for GBP1.75 million (HK$20 million).
New York's Leo Castelli Gallery was the standout of the high-end galleries: its simple display of two stellar Roy Lichtenstein paintings and a tightly hung set of Campbell Soup (after Andy Warhol) paintings by appropriation artist Richard Pettibone was top-class. Many of the high-end galleries merely offered mid-range examples of work by name artists; the crowds that flocked to the fair were intrigued, but collectors used these examples to benchmark prices.
Louise Bourgeois (who died last week), Kiki Smith and Anish Kapoor were all, however, represented with museum-quality pieces.
At last year's fair photography was in abundance, with works by Edward Burtynsky, Atta Kim and Hiroshi Sugimoto on prominent display. This year, photography was sparsely represented except for Candida Hofer.
Dominating and impressive were the sculpture, construction and installation pieces. Most galleries showed three-dimensional pieces, giving the venue the flavour of a sculpture park. Right at the fair entrance was Tang Contemporary Art gallery artist Rirkrit Tiravanija's Ne Travaillez Jamais, a wall of bricks and a pair of high-rise office towers built in wood, replicating China's construction boom. This simple interpretation deepens as the audience sees birds flying within each tower - and the connotations of bird-cage/prison reinforce the mainland's unforgiving urban sprawl, which places secondary importance on a sustainable environment and notions of a safe home.