Art Wars
Hong Kong vs. Singapore
By ALEXANDRA A. SENO
Wall Street Journal, OCTOBER 30, 2009
HONG KONG -- These are the trophies of a war between Singapore and Hong Kong: whimsical oils by Indonesian boy-wonder artist I Nyoman Masriadi; an abstract painting by Zao Wou-ki; and an ancient Chinese imperial throne worth US$11 million. All of these artworks turned up for sale in Hong Kong in recent months -- and set auction records.
Longtime rivals in trade and finance, Hong Kong and Singapore are vying to become Asia's regional arts hub, part of a strategy to be crowned Asia's top city. Already the third-largest art-auction market in the world, Hong Kong has picked up the pace by setting aside nearly US$3 billion for a massive development known as West Kowloon Cultural District, a move some people think will ultimately catapult Hong Kong to victory.
Both cities understand that “to build a super-competitive, super-productive society” that “can attract the world's best and brightest” professionals from an array of industries they need a world-class arts and culture scene, says Richard Florida, who studies global competitiveness and urban development at the University of Toronto. “What makes New York and London so robust, even at times of economic crisis, is that anyone in the world wants to go there (to work) and that's what Hong Kong and Singapore are trying to be.” Right now, Mr. Florida adds, “Hong Kong has the edge.”
On one side of the battle is the island-state of Singapore, with a total population of about five million. In the mid-1980s, during a recession, the country looked with envy at Hong Kong's cultural offerings and decided it could do better. Specifically it eyed Hong Kong's annual month-long arts festival that showcases local and international talent from jazz greats like Ornette Coleman to the English National Ballet to performers of Cantonese opera.
A 1989 Singapore government report cited the “importance of culture and the arts” not only as tools for nation-building and to generate revenue for the tourism and entertainment industries, but to “enhance our quality of life.”
A decade later, Singapore launched the first phase of its ambitious “Renaissance City” plan aimed at creating a “Distinctive Global City of Culture and the Arts.” It invested more than US$1 billion in infrastructure, including several museums and a 4,000-seat complex of theaters, studios and concert halls called the Esplanade, which opened in 2002, and spiced up its arts programming with diversity and a regional flavor.
New entities were founded, such as the Singapore Tyler Print Institute, one of the region's most dynamic arts organizations, which is housed in more than 40,000 square feet of converted warehouse space on the city's riverfront. The printmaking specialist quickly established a profile in the international culture world, collaborating early on projects with the likes of the established American artist Donald Sultan, and lately with Asia's cultural who's who, including Indonesian contemporary painter Agus Suwage and edgy Japanese installation artist Tabaimo.
And Singapore has been cleverly retrofitting colonial-era structures as arts venues. Following a renovation, the circa 1880s National Museum of Singapore reopened in 2006. A school and its chapel built in the 1850s was turned in 1996 into the Singapore Art Museum, a charming cultural space with exhibition galleries of modern and contemporary Southeast Asian art that are on par with the best museums in the world. Down the street in another former school building, an extension called SAM at 8Q, specifically housing contemporary art, opened in August 2008. The National Art Gallery is set to throw open its doors in 2013 at the former Supreme Court and City Hall complexes.
The government launched a biennale in 2006 and over the past decade has enhanced its own annual arts festival. According to Singapore's National Arts Council, between 1997 and 2007, the “vibrancy” of the local arts scene, measured by the number of performances and exhibition days, quadruped to more than 26,000. The government has taken steps to attract world-class theater productions to Singapore, and it has loosened contraints on local productions. Today, mainstream theaters increasingly are allowed to take on political as well as social themes, such as homosexuality, the practice of which is illegal in Singapore.
To groom local talent, the National Arts Council sponsors a program for the performing, visual and literary arts that helps fund Singapore residents to do in-residency stints abroad.
But there's a key ingredient that Singapore so far hasn't been able to create: a big art-auction market. Some smaller art-auction houses hold sales in Singapore, but the big ones -- Christie's and Sotheby's -- have pulled out and moved their Southeast Asian art auctions to Hong Kong, the former British colony that is home to seven million people and became a Chinese territory in 1997.
For a city, having the ingredients for a thriving art market creates a virtuous circle. The powerful marketing machines of the big auction houses, including public previews of coming sales, raises awareness and appreciation of art in the community. All this encourages local artists to create more art. And that momentum, in turn, contributes to the development of a city's broader cultural scene, including music, theater and design.
“We are a financial city, so people understand money but don't always understand art,” says Claire Hsu, executive director of Asia Art Archive, a Hong Kong-based regional culture think tank. “People pay attention to prices, thinking in terms of investment,” she adds, so “people have become interested in art.”
In 2007, Hong Kong became the world's third-largest auction market after New York and London, partly because of its proximity to mainland China and the emergence of China's deep-pocketed collectors. That put Hong Kong firmly on the global art-commerce map.
The point is “about attracting the people who make it matter -- artists, critics, curators and collectors,” says Eugene Tan, formerly head of Singapore's Institute of Contemporary Arts and a high-profile personality on the Singapore arts scene who recently relocated to Hong Kong. “Hong Kong has that advantage” of a collector base that “Singapore has always lacked.”
He and others contend that Hong Kong also has another advantage: a livelier local artists scene.
“Singapore is very planned,” Mr. Tan says, and in the long run, that can mean missing something that “can happen if things are allowed to grow organically.”
Christie's and Sotheby's, the world's two main auction houses, have carefully nurtured their businesses in Hong Kong for decades. Last year, Sotheby's consolidated its sales in Asia by moving its auctions of Southeast Asian contemporary art to Hong Kong from Singapore. That followed a similar move by Christie's in 2002.
Today, the bulk of both their revenues in Asia comes from Hong Kong sales of Chinese antiques and art, categories that have seen prices soar along with China's economic growth. At Sotheby's autumn sales this month in Hong Kong, for instance, an imperial carved throne from the Qianlong period (1736-95) sold for more than US$11 million, including the buyer's premium, a world record for any piece of Chinese furniture sold at auction. The buyer was a Chinese collector in Shanghai.
And at Christie's spring Hong Kong sales in late May, an Asian buyer paid the equivalent of US$4.6 million, including buyer's premium, for the 1957 painting “Nous Deux,” by Zao Wou-ki, the second-highest price ever paid at auction for his work. Harvard University's art-museum fund consigned the piece to Christie's Hong Kong salesroom expecting it to bring a higher price than in the U.S, partly because many collectors in this region consider Mr. Zao to be China's most important living artist. (By comparison, at the same Christie's sales, the entire 72-lot array of Southeast Asian art, which was 90% sold by value, raised just US$2.6 million.)
Relocating the Southeast Asian auctions to Hong Kong buoyed other categories as, for instance, collectors of Chinese contemporary works started to also buy Southeast Asian paintings. More South Korean and Indonesian collectors are turning up at the Hong Kong sales, too. “Since moving to Hong Kong, we saw a three-fold, four-fold increase in clients who participated in our sales of Southeast Asian art,” says Andrew Foster, Christie's Asia president. “Average values go higher as you have more bidders, that's just how auctions work.” He credits the move to Hong Kong with boosting the prices of some lots by as much as 1,000% from what the auction house estimates they would have brought in Singapore.
Several world records for Indonesian art have been established at Hong Kong sales. Right after the collapse of Lehman Brothers in October 2008, just as prices of contemporary Chinese paintings were cooling, Jogjakarta painter I Nyoman Masriadi's satirical triptych “The Man From Bantul (The Final Round),” dating from 2000, netted more than US$1 million at Sotheby's, a first for a contemporary piece from Southeast Asia.
What's more, the move to Hong Kong by the major two houses prompted some smaller ones to follow. “We will go where we feel there is a demand for Asian contemporary art, which right now is Hong Kong,” says Daniel Komala, chief executive of Indonesia's high profile Larasati Auctioneers, which still also holds auctions in Indonesia, Singapore and the Netherlands. Mr. Komala is spokesman for a group of four Asian auction houses, his own plus ones from South Korea, Japan and Taiwan, that staged an inaugural Hong Kong Asian Auction Week in May, selling a respectable 77% of the 146 lots on offer. The group plans another sale in November.
Galleries, too, are following the money. Among them is London's Ben Brown Fine Arts, which plans to formally open in Hong Kong in late November. Ben Brown represents such contemporary art marquee names as conceptual artist Jeff Koons and the late painter Jean-Michel Basquiat, photographer Andreas Gursky and sculptors Claude Lalanne and the late François-Xavier Lalanne. Tamsin Roberts, who will head the Hong Kong branch, says that the gallery has a number of clients in Hong Kong and now will have access to a new market, China. “Everyone is looking at the mainland,” she adds.
Besides geography, Hong Kong's tax system works in its favor. The import and export of artworks is duty-free and there is no sales tax. By comparison, Singapore has a consumption tax of 7%, while China levies a 34% import tax on artworks.
Still, Hong Kong has relatively high overhead costs. John Andreas, CEO of Southeast Asian art specialist Borobudur Auction in Singapore is impressed with Hong Kong's position in the art business but declares: “The cost in Hong Kong -- for hotels, venues, labor -- is at minimum four times of Singapore, but it doesn't mean that selling prices will be four times more.” Mr. Andreas, a collector himself who made his fortune in shipping, has no immediate plans to hold sales in Hong Kong. His five-year-old company conducts auctions in Jakarta and Singapore.
As for art infrastructure, Hong Kong does have some performing-arts venues as well as museums such as for heritage and science. But many of the spaces aren't inviting; there hasn't been a significant art museum built in about 20 years. And while Hong Kong's overall arts scene has improved in recent times and draws such international attractions as the Chanel Mobile Art show, much of the focus, unlike Singapore's more diverse regional offerings, is on Chinese-oriented art and antiques displays.
The Hong Kong government first hit upon the idea in 1998 of building an integrated arts and culture neighborhood on 40 hectares of reclaimed land in the West Kowloon district. After many fits and starts, planning for the project recently picked up some momentum. Earlier this year, at a time when funding to museums and the arts in some countries was being trimmed, the Hong Kong government approved a HK$21.6 billion ($2.8 billion) cash endowment for the project. Then it named Henry Tang, heir to a textile fortune and a collector of Chinese paintings who is also the No. 2 official in the Hong Kong government, to oversee the project, which is currently undergoing yet another round of public consultations. But the only senior executive hired so far abruptly quit after three months citing personal reasons. The post remains vacant.
Mr. Tang says he expects a chief executive to be appointed in early 2010, and to be close to choosing the main architect. Nevertheless, even if it all goes as planned, the first phase won't be open until 2016.
The West Kowloon project has been “frustrating and painful,” says Asia Art Archive's Ms. Hsu, who is also on the advisory panel for the museum at the new West Kowloon development. “For the public it has looked like the government is stalling, but it gives me a lot of hope. The government is very concerned about getting it right.”
Among the missteps so far was an announcement in 2001 that a design by Norman Foster had won an international contest for the iconic structure. Mr. Foster proposed a giant glass canopy to cover the whole 40-hectare site. The idea was to award the project to a single entity that would not only commit to running museums but also to building the canopy. Bidders lined up all-star casts of possible museum partners and consultants: the Louvre, the Guggenheim, the Centre Pompidou. In exchange, the entity could make and sell commercial and residential buildings in the area. By 2004, that approach got the kibosh “because of public opposition to the project related to political developments of the time and memories of Cyberport,” says Ms. Hsu. (The US$2 billion Cyberport project was to be a focal point for a master plan to turn Hong Kong into a technology hub. The right to develop a large tract of government land was awarded in 1999 to Hong Kong businessman Richard Li without a public bid and is now mainly a residential project.)
The current concept for West Kowloon was hatched in June 2007. It calls for about 750,000 square feet of museum space and a 100,000-square-foot exhibition center -- and 15 performance venues with seating for 15,000, more than triple the capacity of Singapore's Esplanade complex. About US$1 billion, or a third of the overall West Kowloon budget, is earmarked for acquisitions for an as-yet-undefined but quirky “Museum Plus.” The museum, though, isn't expected to be completed before 2031.
Yet, just having West Kowloon back in the headlines has spurred the staging of more ambitious projects like this year's Hong Kong-Shenzhen Bi-city Biennale of Urbanism and Architecture in December, which will feature a pavilion by noted Japanese architect Shigeru Ban.
Meantime, critics say more needs to be done to further Hong Kong's art-hub ambitions lest it lose out to Singapore. Plus, Hong Kong needs to stave off a longer-term threat from the likes of Shanghai and Beijing, both of which have burgeoning international arts scenes.
“West Kowloon is a catalyst to cultural development though we also need more policies in place,” says Ada Wong, a founder and chair of the Hong Kong Institute of Contemporary Culture and a former adviser on culture to the Hong Kong government. “We need better art education for the public and to engage” the art-starved housing developments, mostly in Hong Kong's New Territories area.
Undaunted, Singapore is diligently pushing ahead and has opened several museums and other arts venues while Hong Kong has dithered on the construction of West Kowloon. Christie's also recently picked Singapore to be the site of a global fine-arts storage facility to open in a duty-free zone in January.
Calling the process of developing an arts scene “never-ending,” Edmund Cheng, who chairs Singapore's arts council, said in a recent report outlining the city's plans through 2012 that “while there is cause for us to celebrate our achievements, we must set our sights farther afield at the same time.”
—Alexandra A. Seno is a Hong Kong-based writer.
