More than one gallery owner can tell the following tale about their experience selling paintings by the growing wave of realistic Chinese painters available in the U.S. A would-be art buyer walks into the gallery, moves slowly through the space perusing art the way would-be art buyers do. Then the would-be buyer spots a painting by any of a dozen Chinese artists hanging among the rest of the very good painters in the gallery. The client stops and stares. He peers at the name and the price. He moves closer. Not uncommonly he leaves and returns in the afternoon with a clutch of friends. When the group arrives they go straight to the painting by the Chinese artist and stand in front of it whispering and pointing.
Reggie Jackson of Mountain Trials Gallery in Santa Fe has seen this happen more than once. He carries art by Wang Hongjian, age 42, a wonderful painter who lives in China and ships his canvases rolled up in tubes to various galleries in the U.S., including Mountain Trails. Says Jackson, "People come in who bring friends in to see a specific Hongjian painting and ask if they can adjust the lights. When people look at their works they are moved. We have the finest of the American artists, big names, and we get the comments when people round the corner and see a Hongjian."
The list of Chinese realists who sell well in the United States and have done so for the past dozen years is growing. Names like Hongjian, Shang Ding, Zhang Wen Xin, Zhiwei Tu, Huihan Liu, Mian Situ, He Ying, An He and Xiao Gang Zhu may be hard to pronounce, but their ability to connect with American art buyers is nothing less than a major phenomenon in the U.S. art market. Where did these guys (and a radically smaller number of Chinese female painters) come from? China, obviously. But what is it about their work that is so arresting to American collectors? What makes them so saleable in a culture radically different in almost every way from the one they grew up in?
Actually, the culture they come from may be different, but the training they had is decidedly Western, which may account for why American art buyers love their work so much. ...
Xiaogang Zhu's Water Alley in Morning, China, gouache, 14" x 20"
