Comment

The war between India and China has now moved into yet another territory — contemporary art. Forget 1962 and all that. Forget the Chinese inroads into the Kanchipuram silk saris market at home. Forget made-in-China images and idos of Indian gods and goddesses or even pichkaris for Holi. The latest warfronts that just opened up are the auctions in New York.

Come late September, and both Sotheby’s and Christie’s trot out their Asian ware, and increasingly over the last few years the two auction houses have been zooming in on the modern and contemporary art of both countries.

Sotheby’s had, for the first time, a dedicated sale of Indian Contemporary Art, with 58 works by younger artists working in a variety of media, like Riyas Komu, Bharati Kher and Sudershan Shetty. It followed, by a few days, their usual auction of modern Indian paintings by the older generation, dominated by the usual suspects, the Progressive Artists Group, whose works normally have the hammer strike down on stratospheric prices.

Remember Tyeb Mehta crossing the million dollar mark with his work ‘Mahisasura’ last September at the Christie’s auction in New York? This time it was the late FN Souza’s painting, ‘Man with Monstrance’ (1953) sold to a Singaporean collector for $1,360,000 that came out tops at Sotheby’s — fetching almost twice its outside estimate.

However, hold the champagne. The Chinese topped that with ‘Street Theatre’ by Chen Danqing. Painted in 1991, it sold for $1,472,000 during the auction of Contemporary Art Asia that included works from China, Korea and Japan.

Until now the prices of contemporary Chinese art trailed those of contemporary Indian art at auctions, despite the fact that there are far more galleries in London and New York that have zoomed in on young Chinese painters than have on Indian artists.

However, each year the Chinese appear to be bridging the gap in auctions. Zhang Xiaogang’s painting from his ‘Amnesia’ and ‘Memory’ series — ‘Man 2003’ — brought in $884,000, while a group of three paintings from his sought after ‘Bloodline Series’ fetched well over a million dollars. Now comes the news that Christie’s will include Chinese art in its Post-War and Contemporary auctions in November, placing works of artists Xiaogang and Zhang Huan alongside those of Western artists like Mark Rothko and Damien Hirst.

Happily, our modernists, as we call our band from the Progressive Artists Group, and older generation of artists like VS Gaitonde and Tyeb Mehta have crossed the million dollar mark. This month three of them did so: Souza at $1,360,000 was followed by Mehta at $1,248,000 with an untitled canvas from his ‘Falling Figure’ series, and Gaitonde with an untitled work for $1,108,000 — the last bought by a Japanese private collector.

Something to celebrate until we compare the relative ages of the Chinese and the Indian artists. While the two Chinese artists discussed were born in the 50s, the Indian artists (of whom only one is living) belong to a much older generation: Souza was born in 1924, and Mehta the following year. They are the holy cows of modern Indian art.

So, the competition is really with the lot of the younger artists in the Contemporary India art auction, most of them born after partition and concerned with contemporary urban India.

The highest scorer here was Atul Dodiya, with his work ‘Mirage’, an installation from his critically acclaimed ‘Shutter’ series of 2002: it sold for $216,000 to international trade. Alas, it didn’t exceed its estimate figure, despite its originality.
Following not so close on Dodiya’s heels was Shibu Natesan’s ‘Existence of Instinct—4’. Done in 2004, it sold for $156,000-again for less than the high end of the estimates, to an Indian collector. Many of the works of the Chinese artists on the other hand far exceeded Sotheby’s estimates.

The good news is that of the 58 works by Indian artists being auctioned only four went unsold. The not-so-good-news, however, is that, increasingly, for many of them auctions are beginning to serve as their primary markets, bypassing the galleries that may have helped get them there.

The younger lot of Chinese artists seems to be overtaking us when it comes to portraying contemporary culture. Perhaps the indecent gap between long years of repression and conformity and the blitzkrieg of consumerism has given them the cutting satirical edge over us.

Email: jain_madhu@hotmail.com