New York Gallery Opens Beijing Branch

BEIJING — With Asia emerging as a world center for fine art and collectibles, it was only a matter of time before New York’s major art dealers arrived.

The first in line is PaceWildenstein Gallery of New York, which hopes its Beijing branch will open by August 8, in time for the Summer Olympic Games.

The gallery will be housed in a former munitions factory in the heart of Beijing's booming gallery neighborhood, the Factory 798 district, which has become the country’s third-biggest tourist attraction after the Forbidden City and the Great Wall.

“Beijing is a crossroads for Taiwan and Hong Kong,” Arne Glimcher, PaceWildenstein’s chairman, told The New York Times. “Shows there sell out to other parts of Asia.”

Architect Richard Gluckman is leading the $20 million gallery project. Gluckman designed the Andy Warhol Museum in Pittsburgh and oversaw the recent expansion of the Museum of Contemporary Art in San Diego.

Leng Lin, a Chinese art critic and curator, will be Pace’s Beijing president.

The Beijing gallery will be Pace's first overseas venture, and will focus on Chinese artworks. But the first exhibition, "Encounters," will be a group show, with Chinese artists Zhang Huan and Zhang Xiaogang, sharing the space with Western artists including Chuck Close and Alex Katz who are familiar names at Pace exhibitions.

Zhang Huan is a conceptual artist and photographer from an artists’community outside Beijing known as the East Village.

Zhang Xiaogang is a figurative painter whose style is often called Cynical Realism. One of Xiaogang’s “Bloodline Series” portraits, derived from family photographs taken in the 1920s, sold this month for a record $6 million at Sotheby’s in Hong Kong.

Auction houses and dealers alike have been aware of the importance of the Asian art market for some time. Sotheby’s opened an office in Beijing last year, but has held auctions in Hong Kong since 1973 and sent its traveling exhibitions to mainland China since 1995.

Sotheby’s recent four-day series of spring sales in Hong Kong brought in more than $227 million, the company’s highest total ever in Hong Kong.

Christie’s also holds sales in Hong Kong, where profits have grown from $1.8 million in 1986 to $473 million in 2007.

“For hundreds of years, Chinese items were sold off part and parcel and exported to the world,” says Worthologist Thom Pattie. “Now the Chinese economy is booming, a western lifestyle is moving in, and the Chinese are buying back pieces of their heritage.”

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