LI YONGQING gets busy in May every year. As the curator of Dingzheng Art Museum in Shenzhen, he has been traveling to attend the spring auctions of big auction houses in other major cities in China. Meanwhile, he is also receiving visitors who travel from those auction houses to Shenzhen to select items for the upcoming autumn auctions.

“When I visited the auction houses in other cities and witnessed how bustling they were, I couldn’t help hoping that we could also have a top-notch auction house in Shenzhen,” said Li.

He was not alone. An elite auction house in Shenzhen is what the city’s art collectors have longed for.

Over the past 40 years, the rapid economic growth of Shenzhen has provided strong support for the local art market. It has played a leading role in terms of art collection. In the city, there are more than 30 privately-owned museums. Their collections include inscriptions, calligraphy, paintings, jades, porcelains, wood and many other categories.

According to Han Changsheng, head of the collectors’ association of Shenzhen, the city’s art collectors are as much featured as they are active. If you’re looking for someone who has the most complete collection of scholars’ seals from the Ming (1368-1644) and Qing (1644-1911) dynasties, you should come to Shenzhen. Here, you’ll also find major collectors of stone carvings and bronze mirrors from the Han (206 B.C.-A.D. 220) and Tang (618-907) dynasties.

In terms of art trading, Shenzhen is the home of the China (Shenzhen) International Cultural Industries Fair, the No. 1 cultural fair in China. It is also home to the Shenzhen Culture Assets and Equity Exchange, which is one of the two national cultural property trading agencies, as well as artron.net, the country’s most important professional arts website.

In addition, Shenzhen has been offering subsidies to privately-owned museums. National level-one, level-two, and level-three private museums will respectively receive a one-time subsidy of 10 million yuan (US$1.56 million), 8 million yuan and 5 million yuan.

With all the above-mentioned advantages, Shenzhen should have been a heaven for art investment. However, the lack of top auction houses remains a hindrance to the city’s art market.

According to auction.arton.net, an auction website in China, a total of 151 auction companies have signed a self-discipline industrial agreement issued by the China Association of Auctioneers, and only one of them, Auction Co. Ltd. of Shenzhen City, is based in Shenzhen. It is also the only Shenzhen enterprise that’s among the 57 auction companies officially accredited by the association. Additionally, none of the top 10 auction houses in China are in Shenzhen.

According to Li, the reason why Shenzhen has no top auction houses is that most of the city’s auction houses have trouble with positioning themselves and running their businesses.

One collector, who refused to reveal his name, said that some auction houses in the city were not honest. They had put up fake items for auction or delayed payment to the sellers.

Another collector, who also refused to tell his name, pointed out that the auction houses are neither good at organizing auction-related events and lectures nor preparing auction catalogs and providing investment promotion.

In the city, however, there are always high-end buyers that auction houses look for. According to Li, on Oct. 19 last year, a painting by Wu Bin, a court painter of the Ming Dynasty, which had a starting price of 100 million yuan, was sold at 446 million yuan. It was said that the buyer was an entrepreneur from Shenzhen. Having previously determined to get the painting, he had offered to arrange a site to keep the painting even before he attended the auction.

Moreover, according to multiple major auction houses, Shenzhen buyers were often found at their auctions, bidding high prices for items they wanted.

Li also said that such market potential has attracted multiple prestige auction houses, such as Poly Auction, China Guardian and Yongle Auction, to give pre-auction exhibitions here. There are also rumors that some elite auction houses, such as Sotheby’s and Rongbaozhai, will set up branches in the city.

“However, I look forward to the growth of more local auction houses,” said Luo Jianfeng, a local collector.

In his eyes, a sense of mission is what it takes to set up a local high-end auction house. He believes that art collection is for preserving culture rather than just for raking in money. (Lin Lin)