Iranian art is an hors d’oeuvre that Galerie Huit is offering for a taste test

Yas Mostashari Chang was slightly taken aback to hear that this interview was going to lead to her being called a “tastemaker”.

“I don’t believe in taste-making,” she says. “I think art is very subjective. There’s no such thing as good art or bad art, and, as the years pass, my taste changes.”

So let’s just say that Galerie Huit’s new exhibition, “A Postcard from Persia”, is an example of gallery cuisine: an appetite teaser. It was put together in six weeks, she says – “just as a taste”. Mostashari Chang, who was born in Tehran in 1973 and is one of Galerie Huit’s four directors, has a plan: to present a summertime hors-d’oeuvre to the city from five contemporary Iranian artists, assess the public’s appetite and then provide more substantial meals.

It’s good timing. For the past few years, Iranian contemporary art has been moving to the forefront of buyers’ minds, not least in Iran itself; last month, an auction of modern and contemporary Iranian art in Tehran made almost twice what had been estimated, and a work by the late poet and artist Sohrab Sepehri became the most expensive painting ever sold in the country. It went for about HK$6.5 million.

(To put that in a more local context, Zeng Fanzhi’s Last Supper was sold at auction here in 2013 for HK$180 million.)

You won’t see anything close to either price level at Galerie Huit, where the show’s works start at about HK$50,000 and the most expensive is HK$250,000. “I believe art is for everyone, not just the privileged few,” says Mostashari Chang. “Iranian contemporary art is quite inexpensive compared with Chinese contemporary art. Iranian artists still want to cater for Iranians at home. For a moderate investment, one can put together a very serious collection. We didn’t even think about the price; it just happens to be reasonable.”

The title of the exhibition isn’t, strictly, accurate: only two of the five artists live in Iran, and Persia, of course, no longer exists. Yet the very word has connotations of a place, and a past, that may have disappeared but has left behind cultural ripples with an enduring relevance to the country’s diaspora. If anything, in some cases, the show is a postcard to Persia.