Since he first entered the auction world in 1976 as a specialist in Chinese ceramics and hardstones, Colin Sheaf has seen the market grow in leaps and bounds, as waves of new Asian collectors have come one after the other, starting in the 1970s and 1980s with the Hong Kong developers who built some of the most impressive collections of the time, to most recently, mainland Chinese, who have fought hard to bring back home what they consider national treasures. In 2014, a record $36 million was achieved for a rare, tiny “chicken cup” from the Ming Dynasty, one of only 17 known in existence and considered the “holy grail” of China’s art world. The previous record for Chinese porcelain had been set in 2010 at $32.4 million by a gourd-shaped Qianlong vase.Blouin Lifestyle in conversation with the seasoned auctioneer about the current state of the market.How would you characterize the Chinese antiques market in simple terms?In the broadest sense you can divide the Chinese antique market into three categories: pieces that were originally made to be exported, archaeological pieces that started to be excavated in the 1920s when the Chinese railway network was being built, and then the pieces that are currently driving the market, the Guan Yao, or ‘official kilns’ pieces that were made for daily use in the imperial court and the highest layer of society.How are these various markets performing?The archaeological market, that traditionally appealed to American and European museums and collectors back in the 1920s, is not the force it was, much complicated by international government regulations that have made it virtually impossible to import and export these excavated pieces. The ‘Chinese export’ market, which has long been dominated by European collectors, has been very flat for almost a generation. All the activity right now really focuses on the Guan Yao market.Has that market been affected by the recent economic fallout?Actually, beyond a few headline numbers, that market has been rather flat for about three years. We saw a big peak in 2011. I held the biggest auction of Chinese art ever held in Europe in November 2011 and when I got off the rostrum, someone said to me ‘that’s the top of the market,’ and in a funny way it did mark the peak. The market hasn’t really fallen but it’s drifted, bubbling along, and we’re certainly not estimating anything at more than (it would have been) two years ago and some re-offered pieces are selling for less than prices two years ago. What has changed is where the activity is coming from. Five years ago there were tons of people in mainland China buying in the middle market, within the $10,000-100,000 range where you can get a lot of nice things. Today there are less private collectors in mainland China buying these middle range pieces. I am told that this partly reflects the impact of the anticorruption campaign. But to be honest, there are so many people around the world who like the Chinese classical art that a fall in demand from mainland Chinese is not going to send the market into a tailspin. That’s why prices have just drifted. There is always a collector somewhere interested in Chinese antiques. At the very top end of the market, there is only a handful of collectors willing and able to pay these prices, but that has always been the case. Right now if I was a Chinese collector whose stocks have fallen by 40% I would not be putting my money into Chinese porcelain either. When a great lot comes along there will always be buyers somewhere in Shanghai, Taipei, or Europe wanting to buy it. But there are also quite a lot of people now in China who don’t want to spend $50,000 on a very nice, but middle range piece of porcelain when no one really knows where the market is going. It’s a bit of a jittery time. Nothing has fallen off a cliff at all, but people are a little bit more conscious that there is a cliff over there somewhere, than they were perhaps two or three years ago.
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