Chinese Bidders Conquer Market

China’s soaring financial power is sweeping across the market for Chinese art like a hurricane carrying off all that lies in its path.

As recently as last spring, Chinese bidders represented an important force at Western auctions, but came nowhere near dominating the scene.

Such an achievement would then have seemed unthinkable, given the deep roots of the Western collecting tradition, which goes as far back as the early 1600s, when blue and white porcelain in the technique smuggled from China was produced in a Florentine workshop working for the Medici court. In the 20th century, Britain and France, later surpassed by America, became the major players. Extraordinary collections were formed, some laying the foundation of future museums such as the fabulous donation of Charles Lang Freer housed in the Freer Gallery of Art in Washington and, most recently, the bequest of Arthur M. Sackler displayed in its twin institution the Arthur M. Sackler Gallery, organically linked with it.

All that now seems doomed to become a memory of the past. True, for the moment most of the greatest living collectors of Chinese art can be argued to be Westerners, from Zurich — where the Meyintang collection of Chinese ceramics built over many years by two Swiss brothers is unsurpassed — to New York, where the intensely private Leon Black keeps his admirable ancient bronzes.

Judging from last week’s buying binge in New York, which the Chinese attended in such large numbers that Christie’s decided to hold the auction in the vast room usually reserved for Impressionist and Contemporary art, the days when Westerners with a great eye and the required cash could amass fabulous hoards of Chinese art are probably over. Roughly two thirds of the 611 lots that came on the block in a mammoth two-day sale went to Chinese dealers and collectors. They bought across the board, in every category, at every financial level.

The ultimate symbol of the fierce Chinese determination to buy back their art that strayed to the West in the quasi-colonial days of the 19th and early 20th century is the acquisition of a hand scroll titled Chan Yue tu, “Happiness through Chan Practice,” which was signed by Yu Zhiding in the early 1700s. Professional circles are convinced that the buyer is Liu Yiqian, the Shanghai billionaire. Estimated by Christie’s to be worth $120,000 to $150,000 plus the sale charge, the hand scroll made $3.44 million.

Its acquisition epitomizes the complex mix of motivations driving Chinese buyers. The painting was one of many works consigned by the Los Angeles collector Robert Blumenfield. It had earlier been in the possession of Xiang Hanping, a general in the nationalist army whose collector’s seal dated 1934 appears on the frontispiece. This provenance made the recovery of the painting doubly desirable.

More important, the message of the painting transformed its acquisition into a personal statement at a higher level.

“Chan,” pronounced Zen in Japanese, is the name of the esoteric movement that took off in Song times and left a deep imprint in the psyche of the Chinese elite. The hand scroll, on the other hand, is the work of an artist who was one of the Kangxi emperor’s official painters. This indirectly gives the painting the aura of an imperial connection that all Chinese buyers, regardless of social background, find irresistible.

Not least, the subject honors a scholar and famous man of letters, further enhancing its attraction to those who admire traditional culture. The hand scroll portrays Wang Shizhen, a friend of the painter and a famous poet, seated at a table laden with books, in a mountainous setting, presumably a retreat that he had chosen after leaving the court. The 15 colophons signed by Wang Shizhen’s friends, most of whom had been in government service, praise his virtues. They celebrate him as the living incarnation of Chan ideals.

As a work of art, the hand scroll suffers from the dry formalism that prevailed in Kangxi court painting. But the auction house experts underestimated the emotional charge of its multiple messages. To the buyer and his Chinese underbidders, it proved overwhelming.

Indeed, it is the pull of powerful mixed emotions as much as the nation’s created wealth that explains the torrential force of the Chinese rush on the art from China’s past.

Collectors pounce on rhinoceros horn vessels seen as objects for the scholar’s table but equally coveted for a material credited by tradition with properties ranging from poison detection to sexual performance enhancement. Add a blossoming peach tree (the peach is a symbol of eternal life) carved on the sides of a beaker, and some rare feature like a kneeling monkey supporting the beaker, and bidders will go berserk. A small cup, 14.6 centimeters, or 5.7 inches, high that once belonged to a Dutch collector, Theo van Veen, long before passing into Mr. Blumenfield’s hands, more than tripled its estimate at $290,500 paid by a collector from mainland China.

This was outshone by another Blumenfield rhinoceros horn vessel. The cup is carved in low relief with the figure of a famous poet of the fifth century A.D., Tao Yuanming, admiring a chrysanthemum sprig in a rocky landscape. Another mainland Chinese buyer footed the $578,500 bill for this homage to ancient literary achievements.

Mental associations with a recent past underlie the massive entry of Chinese collectors into fields where almost none would have ventured two decades ago.

Ancient bronzes, if retrieved from underground caches, were taboo because the recovery process violated ancestral tombs. These are now seen as part of the cultural heritage unlawfully removed from its homeland. Last week at Christie’s, the three finest pieces went back to China. All came from the collection of the late Mr. Sackler and had earlier been ensconced in English, American or Japanese collections. Memories are long in the Orient and such provenances, which come as reminders of bygone foreign intrusions, still tend to make Chinese blood boil.

A superb bronze vase cast with an abstract pattern in the fourth or third century B.C. sold for $119,500 to a major mainland collector. Later a powerful Western Zhou food vessel with stylized dragons in low relief caused a bigger stir. Christie’s noted that it was consigned from Ashiya, Japan, and had entered the Japanese collection before World War II. Rightly or wrongly, this inevitably conjures visions of the Japanese rampaging in war-torn China. A Beijing collector paid $386,500, twice Christie’s high estimate, for the privilege of returning the remarkable vessel to its homeland.

Important works handled in recent years by leading Western dealers were also targeted. The superb pricket candlestick held up by a standing figure with non-Chinese features cast in the third or second century B.C., which could be seen in 1995 in a London selling show put together by Giuseppe Eskenazi, realized $104,500. It is now on its way to continental China.

Interestingly, unobtrusive objects, when perceived to be important — like a rare “ruyi,” or scepter in parcel-gilt silver of the 16th century — caught the eye of a collector from mainland China, despite its heavy oxydization. Before entering the late Mr. Sackler’s collection, the fine object was handled in the early 20th century by Tonying & Co. At $3,750, it was last week’s bargain. The client for whom Christie’s Beijing representative was seen bidding must be chuckling to himself.

Even sculpture ripped off the walls of Buddhist shrines in the early 20th century, long shunned as the result of a desecration, finds its way back into Chinese hands. A limestone seated Bodhisattva bought by Avery Brundage from Tonying & Co. was later sold by him to Nagatani Inc. in Chicago. It was eventually acquired by Mr. Sackler. Reproduced in several art books, the sculpture was included in the “Comprehensive Illustrated Catalogue of Chinese Buddhist Statues in Overseas Collections,” edited in 2005 by the Chinese scholar Sun Di. An overseas Chinese collector heard the message transparently implied in the title and settled the $914,500 bill.

Theow Tow, who deftly negotiated the consignment of the various parts of the Sackler collection sold at Christie’s and raised Christie’s market share to 73 percent from 25 percent in 1986, largely through his many connections in China, is amazed at the speed with which the Chinese have established their control over the market. Mr. Tow concludes: “We just witnessed a tectonic change.”