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“I like to be able to say positive things, but this is the market we’re in at the moment,” Dr McAndrew says. “Maybe it will surprise us and turn around again?

In addition to supporting artists, Ullens also helped establish a secondary market for Chinese contemporary art, selling works from the collection over the years, including in 2017, when when he and his wife auctioned off 50 works. One such consignment, Zeng’s The Last Supper  for $23.3 million at Sotheby’s Hong Kong in 2013, setting the auction record for contemporary Asian art at the time. The reason they gave: to buy more art. 

“Our job as collectors is to promote young artists,” Ullens told the the Press. “I want my art to give me goose bumps. When I get them, I know it’s something good.”

His importance for promoting Chinese contemporary art will be well remembered.

Overstimulation is at the heart of American artist Sarah Sze’s new mixed-media paintings, featured in a solo exhibition at Hong Kong. These works at Gagosian Hong Kong continue Sze’s explorations of new technology and our relationships with images in the digital age. “Images and their authorship are always in flux,” the artist said in a statement. “We build, rebuild, and trade images like never before.”

Sze’s new paintings take elements from her previous paintings, which she obscures with collaged paper, dripping brushstrokes of neon pink paint, and various other materials and methods. Forever Now (2025), for instance, features a base image of a city skyline against a waterfront. Sze has altered the original image by adding snowy mountains that cover the entire right side of the canvas. Streaks of blue, silver, and pink paint cross the canvas and pasted images of a wolf and a bird are superimposed on its surface.

The density of these paintings contrasts with Sze’s “Fracture Image” hanging sculptures, which feature images printed on paper and suspended from the ceiling. Evoking the playfulness and soothing qualities of a baby’s mobile, these works offer a reprieve from the visual assault of the artist’s new paintings.

Shenzhen-born artist Yuan Fang’s ‘curves’ paintings are sought after by galleries in New York, London, Shanghai and Sydney; now the 28-year-old is coming to Hong Kong to show the works that have mesmerised the art world

Overlapping curved strokes evocative of turbulent winds or oscillating waves, painted in vibrant shades of red, purple and ultramarine with an outburst of energy similar to that of abstract expressionist Jackson Pollack, these characteristics have come to be a signature of Yuan Fang’s paintings.

She may have only started her art career in 2018, but the 28-year-old, Shenzhen -born painter has already exhibited around the world: Skarstedt Gallery in London, New York’s Half Gallery, Nerman Museum of Contemporary Art in Kansas, Beijing’s Hive Center for Contemporary Art, Foshan’s He art Museum and Sydney’s Coma Gallery, to name a few. Last year, she became the youngest person to have a solo show at Shanghai’s Long Museum, the largest private museum in mainland China. In 2023, Fang, a graduate of The School of Visual Arts (SVA) in New York, sold a 2022 painting titled Expanse (Mask) for US$88,900 (about HK$700,000). A year later, she made it onto Forbes Asia’s 30 Under 30 list for her achievements in and influence on the art world.

This month, she is set to head back to Asia to showcase works in Hong Kong. She will exhibit five large-scale oil and acrylic paintings, as well as two drawings on paper, created between 2021 and 2024, at Tatler’s ARTable, an event co-hosted by DBS bank and Tatler celebrating the visual and culinary arts. Later in March, her works will be presented at Art Basel Hong Kong.

“It’ll be a broad range of works. I want to give people a more comprehensive understanding of my practice,” Fang says. “My works are abstract and contain a lot of layers, curved lines and shapes. I want to use the interaction between each layer in the painting to dictate a turbulent, chaotic relationship between them to create a metaphor for the living condition of human being. That’s the whole concept of my art.”

Fang’s style is a far cry from previous generations of Chinese-born, New York-based modern artists, such as Xu Bing, Wenda Gu and Zhang Hongtu. Their works are imbued with stories about the Chinese diaspora, memories of the country’s political history or influences of traditional Chinese styles, such as ink art and calligraphy. A mix of eastern and western aesthetics and concepts, their creations offered the western art market in the 1980s and 1990s a glimpse of the Chinese identity.

But Fang, who has been based in New York for the last ten years, decided that she would forge her path a little differently. “I don’t want to brand myself too much as a Chinese artist here, because I’m not really into playing the identity politics game,” she says, referring to how there can sometimes be more focus on a Chinese artist’s heritage than their art.

“In terms of art, I’m like a ‘banana’,” she says, using a colloquialism that refers to someone who is of Asian heritage and had a western-style upbringing. “I had all of my art education outside China. So when I was in Shanghai for Art Week last November, I felt unfamiliar with the setting, artists and galleries. I felt like a foreigner. But when I’m back in New York, I feel like I belong in the art scene here more than when I’m in China.”

Traces of abstract expressionism can be observed in her works, and Fang further draws inspiration from her life and the world around her to create her unique style. “I’m just trying to create a contemporary, new version of abstract paintings,” she says.

The curves are a recurring motif in her work, but that is all she knows she’ll use when she begins. “I don’t start with a sketch; I’m spontaneous and improvise when I paint. There are a lot of unpredictable factors in the process, which I find [reflective of ] the world we’re living in: there are wars going on; and three years ago, there was the pandemic. So we don’t really know what’s going to happen in the future,” she says. “My work conveys these uncertainties.”

With great sadness we announce the passing of Mel Bochner on February 12, 2025. Bochner was a pioneering figure in 20th-century American art who used language and mathematics to challenge conventional artmaking techniques and the systems that structure our world. He was 84 years old.

 

Bochner was recognized as one of the leading figures in the development of Conceptual art in New York in the 1960s and 1970s. Emerging at a time when painting was increasingly discussed as outmoded, Bochner became part of a new generation of artists which also included Eva Hesse, Donald Judd, and Robert Smithson - artists who, like Bochner, were looking at ways of breaking with Abstract Expressionism and traditional compositional devices. His pioneering introduction of the use of language in the visual, led Harvard University art historian Benjamin Buchloh to describe his 1966 Working Drawings as ‘probably the first truly conceptual exhibition.'

 

Bochner came of age during the second half of the 1960s, a moment of radical change both in society at large as well as in art. While painting slowly lost its preeminent position in modern art, language moved from talking about art to becoming part of art itself. Bochner has consistently probed the conventions of both painting and of language, the way we construct and understand them, and the way they relate to one another to make us more attentive to the unspoken codes that underpin our engagement with the world.

Thousands of artists have signed an open letter opposing Christie’s forthcoming all-A.I. auction, expressing “serious concern” over how the works on offer were created.

Launching on February 20, “Augmented Intelligence” is the first Christie’s auction to comprise entirely of artworks created with artificial intelligence (the auction house was also the first to sell an A.I. artwork in 2018). Artists featured in the sale include Alexander Reben, OpenAI’s first artist-in-residence, the husband-and-wife duo of Holly Herndon and Mat Dryhurst, Pinder Van Arman, Refik Anadol, Claire Silver, Linda Dounia, and Harold Cohen, best known for his pioneering A.I. program AARON.

The open letter, however, objects to “many of the artworks” in the sale that it says “were created using A.I. models that are known to be trained on copyrighted work without a license.” It did not specify which works it found to be at issue.

“These models, and the companies behind them, exploit human artists, using their work without permission or payment to build commercial A.I. products that compete with them,” the letter added.

The missive—which is addressed to Nicole Sales Giles and Sebastian Sanchez, Christie’s VP and digital art director and manager of digital art sales respectively—urges Christie’s to cancel the auction, “if you have any respect for human artists.”

“Your support of these models, and the people who use them,” it reads, “rewards and further incentivizes A.I. companies’ mass theft of human artists’ work.”

As of writing, the letter has garnered more than 3,600 signatures, most of which come from artists, illustrators, photographers, and other creatives. Among them are Karla Ortiz and Kelly McKernan, who, along with illustrator Sarah Andersen, filed a class action lawsuit in 2023 against A.I. companies Midjourney Inc, DeviantArt Inc, and Stability A.I. Ltd, alleging copyright violation.

In response to the letter, a Christie’s spokesperson said over email: “The artists represented in this sale all have strong, existing multidisciplinary art practices, some recognized in leading museum collections. The works in this auction are using artificial intelligence to enhance their bodies of work.”

Dryhurst, speaking to the Guardian, also rejects the letter’s claims. He and Herndon have been vocal in advocating for artists’ rights in the age of A.I.—for one, they co-founded Spawning, a platform that helps artists discover if their work has been used in training datasets and blocks A.I. web scrapers. Their work, including xhairymutantx, their 2024 Whitney Biennial entry on offer at 

“Augmented Intelligence,” has sought to interrogate how A.I. is reshaping identity and creativity.

“It is not illegal to use any model to create artwork,” Dryhurst told the Guardian. “I resent that an important debate that should be focused on companies and state policy is being focused on artists grappling with the technology of our time.”

Anadol responded to the open letter on X by highlighting that “majority of the artists in the [auction are] specifically pushing and using their own datasets + their own models!” The new media artist, who just unveiled a massive installation at Kunsthaus Zurich, has also been mindful to train his algorithms on “publicly available datasets.”

“This is the basic problem of entire art ecosystem,” he tweeted, “results of lazy critic practices and doomsday hysteria driven dark minds.”

Other digital artists have similarly weighed in on the missive. On X, Beeple shared a tongue-in-cheek artwork depicting a large robot, with a human on a leash, reading a poster-sized version of the letter, which has been marked up in red. “THE WAR OF ART,” he titled the post.

 

Jack Butcher, meanwhile, has minted the open letter as an open edition digital artwork, titled “Undersigned Artists.” He described the act as an “inversion: a protest against A.I. art minted as A.I. art,” enfolding “a condemnation of A.I.-generated works trained on unlicensed human labor” into “part of the system it critiques.” He added: “Instead of vanishing into the cycle of outrage, it is fixed, tokenized, and placed within the same marketplace it seeks to disrupt.”

A Chinese artist’s paintings of inmates living inside one of Rome’s most well-known prisons will be projected on the prison building’s exterior and displayed in a new exhibit space near the Vatican as part of 2025 Jubilee initiatives.

The 64-year-old Yan Pei-Ming is a Chinese contemporary artist who has been living in Dijon, France since 1981. He is known for his “epic-sized” portraits of figures such as Chairman Mao, St. Pope John Paul II, Bruce Lee, and Barack Obama.

Pei-Ming’s latest portrait series, 27 prisoners living inside Regina Coeli Prison, will be displayed on the side of the prison building. The works, created at the request of the Vatican’s education and culture dicastery, will be the inaugural exhibit of a new art space on Via della Conciliazione, the main street leading to St. Peter’s Basilica.   

The Vatican will highlight the work of contemporary artists during the 2025 Jubilee Year and beyond with the new exhibit space, called “Conciliazione 5,” to be inaugurated Feb. 15, during the Jubilee of Artists and the World of Culture.

The Vatican has planned a slew of events for the Feb. 15-18 Jubilee of Artists, including the opening of the contemporary art space, Sunday Mass with Pope Francis, and the first-ever visit by a pope to the film studios of Cinecittà.

The Vatican expects more than 10,000 people from across the wider art and cultural environments — hailing from over 100 countries and five continents — to participate in events over the four days.

The curator of the Yan Pei-Ming exhibit at “Conciliazione 5,” Cristiana Perrella, told journalists on Wednesday that Pei-Ming created the 27 inmate portraits in a matter of 20 days late last year in a studio in Shanghai. Due to time constraints, the painter worked from photos and also asked for information about the prisoners’ lives. 

The portraits, Perrella said, help us to remember that inmates “are not the crime they have committed, that people’s meanings are not in this — they are paying for a crime they have done — but ... the people who live in the prison are alive, they have thoughts and dreams. And Pei-Ming’s work helps us to remember all that, to look at the prison community with a different perspective. And that precisely is the strength of art, the strength of this project.”

“The theme of hope, strongly felt by Pope Francis, intersects humanity in places of hardship,” Lina Di Domenico, the head of the prison administration department of Italy’s Ministry of Justice, said on Feb. 12.

Cardinal José Tolentino de Mendonça said at a Feb. 12 press conference the purpose of the Jubilee Year initiatives is to cultivate a dialogue on hope: “To question how contemporary art can convey hope by reaching out to sensitive human places. To search together for spiritual and artistic expressions that can serve as grammars and poetries of hope for the contemporary time.”

Originally the site of a 17th-century convent, from which it gets its name, the Regina Coeli Prison was constructed in 1881 by the Italian government after the country's unification. A women’s prison called the Mantellate was later built nearby, also on the site of a former convent.

On January 16, Zhang Wei, a pioneer of abstract painting in China, passed away at the age of 73.

Zhang is known for his experimental abstractions that reflect the instinctive approach of action painting. Through his dramatic visual vocabulary, emotive colors, and “style-as-substance” technique, his works exude a profoundly modern quality while paying tribute to traditional Chinese ink and calligraphy.

Born in 1952 in Beijing, Zhang began his artistic career as a self-taught illustrator before joining the Wuming (No Name) collective in the 1970s, one of the first underground art groups to self-organize during the Cultural Revolution. In line with the group’s mission to rebel against politically prescribed conventions of realism, Zhang developed a unique style of conceptual landscape painting. 

In the early 1980s, Zhang co-hosted an experimental exhibition in his home which paved the way for Chinese Apartment Art—an underground countercultural movement during which artists created and showcased their work at private studios within public residential complexes, to bypass the authorities. In his late 30s, Zhang became inspired by Western abstract expressionism and began to strive for unrestrained self-expression through non-representational form. 

After taking part in the 1986–87 landmark touring exhibition “Avant-Garde Chinese Art” in New York state alongside renowned figures such as dissident artist Ai Weiwei, Zhang continued to hold solo shows during his nearly 20-year stay in the US. He has also participated in several exhibitions in Hong Kong, including “Light before Dawn: Unofficial Chinese Art 1974–1985” at the Asia Society Hong Kong Center in 2013, and “M+ Sigg Collection: Four Decades of Chinese Contemporary Art” at ArtisTree in 2016. 

Zhang’s work is held in the collections of the Art Institute of Chicago and Hong Kong’s M+.

After a five-year legal battle, Chinese artist Ye Yongqing has been found guilty of plagiarizing the work of Belgian artist Christian Silvain. The Beijing Intellectual Property Court upheld a previous ruling from 2023 and ordered the artist to pay EUR 650,000 (USD 670,500) in damages—a record sum for a case relating to fine arts in China. Ye has also been ordered to issue a public apology in the Global Times, a major Chinese newspaper. The court warned the artist that failure to comply with the ruling could result in imprisonment.

Ye has been copying Silvain’s work since he visited an exhibition by the Belgian painter in Paris in 1990. In the three decades since, Ye’s paintings have sold for monumental sums—hundreds of thousands of dollars more than Silvain’s—at major auction houses such as Christie’s and Sotheby’s, and many of his works are owned by prominent collectors including American billionaire Bill Gates and media mogul Rupert Murdoch. 

The case has been ongoing since November 2019, after the Belgian newspaper Het Nieuwsbladfirst brought attention to the similarities between Ye and Silvain’s works. Following the initial accusations, Ye was dismissed from his position as a professor at Chongqing’s prestigious Sichuan Fine Arts Institute. His damaged reputation has prevented him from having any exhibitions since 2018, and his work has been removed from several museums. 

As the first foreign artist to win a plagiarism case against a Chinese artist, Silvain expressed relief at the verdict, describing it as “the end of a long battle” after years of witnessing Ye’s garnering substantial profit and success from the plagiarism of his work. 

Red is the color as global art market comes storming back after global financial crisis 

-- Want to sell that masterpiece for a fortune? It might help if it's red. 

That's just one trend from an art market that has come roaring back from the global financial crisis, with buyers from emerging markets such as China molding tastes and driving top-end prices ever higher. 

Sotheby's put its works on public display in London, and there was a distinct scarlet hue to the star lots — Gerhard Richter's cadmium-colored abstract "Wall," expected to sell for at least 15 million pounds; an Andy Warhol portrait of Chairman Mao valued at 5 million pounds to 7 million pounds; a vivid red piece in molten plastic by Alberto Burri that could break the 3-million-pound record for the Italian artist. "When we're pricing things we're aware of the power of red," said Alex Branczik, head of Sotheby's contemporary art department in London. 

"Red is a color that incites passion. It's the color of the sunset, it's the color of blood," he said. "I think it's more primal than nationality, but I do think it has a special resonance for Asian buyers," for whom red may have associations with luck and happiness. There is some evidence to support this theory — four of the five most expensive Richters ever sold are red. 

Buyers from Asia, and especially China, are one reason the art market has rebounded from the global financial crisis of 2008. Newly affluent Chinese collectors began by buying works from their own country — both modern art and historic treasures — before moving into European contemporary art and other areas. 

Sotheby's estimates that China now accounts for $14 billion of the $58 billion global art market. Asian buyers spent twice as much on contemporary artworks at the auction house in 2013 as they did the year before. 

Art spending by Latin Americans also leapt last year, while Russian and Middle Eastern collectors continue to pay record prices. 

"When I started in this industry, it was really European and American (buyers)," said Jay Vincze, head of Christie's Impressionist and modern department. "Now it is truly global. "The market is strong," he said. "The buyers are out there." That has led to a mood of quiet optimism at the auction houses. 

In sales of Impressionist, modern and Surrealist art , Christie's has Pablo Picasso's "Woman in a Turkish Costume," a portrait of his wife and muse Jacqueline Roque — estimated at up to 20 million pounds — and Juan Gris' Cubist "Still Life with Checked Tablecloth," valued at up to 18 million pounds. There are also multimillion-dollar works by Piet Mondrian, Rene Magritte, Fernand Leger and Joan Miro. "When you look around these rooms, the supply we've got this season is incredibly rich and varied," Vincze said Thursday. "The quality is very, very high." A few blocks away at Sotheby's, sales include Vincent Van Gogh's "Man is at Sea," once owned by actor Errol Flynn; Lucian Freud's portrait "Head on a Green Sofa"; and works by Claude Monet, Marc Chagall and Henri Matisse. 

It's a far cry from the jittery years after the 2008 banking crisis, when works went unsold or reached lackluster prices. 

Auctioneers are already looking to woo the next wave of wealthy art buyers. Christie's held its first sale in India last month, and Sotheby's opens soon an exhibition of Indian and international art in New Delhi. 

And, said Branczik, "I think Central Asia is interesting. It's a place where a lot of wealth is being generated."