In the 1980s there was barely an art market in China and now it is one of the world’s largest. Based on extensive ethnographic fieldwork in the Beijing contemporary art market and interviews with artists, art dealers, collectors, museum directors, auction house employees and others, this talk will discuss how market emergence is done and perceived by its participants. In particular, it will address how the valuation of art happens in this new market, how this market’s participants perceive their market, and how the contemporary art market in China relates to established art markets in Europe and the US.

About the speaker:

Dr. Svetlana Kharchenkova (韓思瑋) is the lecturer of Sociology of modern China at Leiden University, the Netherlands. Her research bridges contemporary China studies and economic and cultural sociology. She defended her PhD dissertation White Cubes in China: A Sociological Study of China’s Emerging Market for Contemporary Art at the University of Amsterdam in 2017. Her research of the development of the Chinese contemporary art market has been published, among others, in Socio-Economic Review and Poetics: Journal of Empirical Research on Culture, the Media and the Arts.

Language: English