Jing Daily’s Top Posts For The Week#
In case you missed them the first time around, here are some of Jing Daily’s top posts for the week of May 3-7:
Chinese Artist Zeng Fanzhi: “I Don’t Want To Be Pigeonholed”
Over the past 15 years Chinese contemporary artist Zeng Fanzhi has emerged as one of his country’s most well-known artists, surpassing Zhang Xiaogang in sales last year to become China’s highest-grossing contemporary artist of 2009 and proving exceptionally popular among China’s new breed of super-collectors. Last week, at BAZAAR magazine’s 8th annual charity auction in Shanghai, a new piece by Zeng, “Untitled 10-3-23″ sold for 10 million yuan (US$1.46 million), and 100% of works by Zeng up for grabs at the recent Sotheby’s spring auction in Hong Kong sold, pulling in a grand total of US$1.88 million.
Clearly Zeng Fanzhi is one of China’s most important contemporary artists, but what’s behind his artwork? His newer works have largely moved far beyond his early “Mask” series, becoming increasingly abstract and losing any obvious connection to the cynical realist works that were a centerpiece of his early career.
Luxury Brands (And Shoppers) Converge At World Expo
In addition to the high-tech displays and architecture at the Shanghai World Expo, free-spending shopaholics can feast their eyes (and drop their cash) on rare and exclusive products up for grabs at several pavilions. From dinner at the authentic restaurant at the French pavilion (wait list = 3 days) to special El Salvadorean coffee to Cuban art, well-heeled visitors to the expo can take advantage of their trip as an excuse to go on an around-the-world shopping binge.
From Sina (translation by Jing Daily team):
You don’t have to run from country to country — At the Shanghai World Expo, you can buy the most representative items from just about every country. Here, shopping really is over the top.
Singaporean Auction House Lauches New Service To Educate New Asian Art Collectors
New Chinese Collectors have become the darlings of the art auction market in the wake of the global economic crisis, and more Asian auction houses have begun to actively court collectors throughout East and Southeast Asia as the auction markets in Hong Kong and mainland China have boomed.
Among these home-grown Asian auction houses, Ravenel from Taiwan (previously on Jing Daily), Borobudur from Indonesia and China’s Poly and Guardian have emerged as some of the most profitable and fastest growing in the world. Now, looking to follow in the footsteps of these Asian auction houses, the ten-year-old Singaporean auction house Larasati has launched a new service designed for new Asian collectors who want to learn more about appreciating and collecting art.
BMW, Daimler, Audi Quarterly China Sales Skyrocket
Spurred on by consumer incentives or enticed by special China-only elongated models, Chinese car buyers have buoyed sales of Europe’s top marques and helped them escape the worst grips of the global economic downturn. This year alone, Chinese car buyers have gone far beyond projections, with BMW selling over 44,000 vehicles in the first quarter alone. (46,619 cars were sold by the BMW group, which includes MINI and Rolls-Royce, as a whole in China.) This is more than double BMW’s figures from the first quarter of 2009, when BMW sold 16,580 cars in China, which itself was an improvement over 14,574 units a year earlier.
In addition to BMW’s solid popularity among younger businesspeople and new elongated models, the BMW group’s broader success in China so far this year also owes something to a strong promotional push by Rolls-Royce last year and MINI’s more direct China-focused marketing strategy. Look for MINI to increase its presence in China this year even further as field-testing on the new MINI E electric picks up in China.
Hawaii Spending $450,000 At Shanghai Expo To Promote Island Tourism
Recently, the U.S. Department of Commerce projected that 556,000 Chinese tourists would the United States in 2010 — a 15% jump over the year before — and that by 2015, that number would exceed 800,000. As Jing Daily noted last month, as travel restrictions continue to ease and more Chinese tourists head outward, a number of American states have kicked up their promotional efforts in the China market, with more states incorporating the Chinese language into their websites and Hawaiian governor Linda Lingle traveling with a delegation to six Chinese cities last fall in the hopes of drumming up more Chinese tourism to her state.
As Ted Liu, Director of the Hawaii Department of Business, Economic Development and Tourism said around the time of Lingle’s China trip, once Hainan Airlines begins offering direct flights between Beijing and Honolulu some time in 2010, Hawaii tourism officials expect to see nearly 12,000 more mainland Chinese tourists in Hawaii per year.