Online art fairs are no longer a virtual substitute for their physical original versions. They""re fast evolving into a distinct category of viewing experience. Joyce Yip reports.
It""s that time of the year when collectors, artists and art aficionados from Hong Kong head West, to attend the major international art fairs in London, Paris and New York. This year Hong Kong""s arts fraternity, like their counterparts elsewhere in the world, is hunched over their computers instead.
The online iterations of physical art fairs that had begun to emerge in March and April as a result of coronavirus-triggered lockdowns across the world have evolved over the last few months. They now have a full-fledged ecosystem of their own.
Organizers have repeatedly stressed that online art fairs are not meant to replace physical fairs. For instance, the latest edition of Art Basel""s online viewing rooms, titled OVR:2020, is the first digital show not tied to any of the leading international art fair brand""s physical fairs and includes a new live chat feature to facilitate better communication between galleries and collectors.
OVR:2020 ran from Sept 23 to 26. It featured more than 100 galleries submitting six works each, all created within this year. The next edition, OVR:20c, is dedicated to works made between 1990 and 1999 and will run from Oct 28 to 31.
Frieze London, which opened on Oct 7 and ends today, went digital for the first time, welcoming exhibitors and participants to its free-to-access viewing room platform. Its offerings include works from London galleries as well as museum-quality pieces sourced from around the world.
Well-known international galleries with a base in Hong Kong among other cities in China, like White Cube, Hauser & Wirth and Simon Lee Gallery participated in both fairs. Most of the exhibits are themed around the ongoing pandemic, such as escapism, optimism, living-in-the-moment and oppression. Art on paper seems to be a favorite as these appear closest to the original when viewed online.
Beijing and Taipei-based Tina Keng Gallery presented a collection of images titled Water Streaming into Inkstone: The Paintings of Su Xiaobai. The collection marks a shift to a brighter palette and the introduction of a new oil-wash technique whereby a half-dried top layer of lacquer is washed with oil to let the thinner coats of paint under it show.
Art from East Asia also included images of the moon painted in rainbow colors by Wang Yuyang. Claudia Albertini, director of Massimo de Carlo gallery which represented Wang at OVR:2020, says the paintings convey a sense of "joyful chaos amidst the pandemic" to the viewers.
Edouard Malingue Gallery unveiled new works created by the Hong Kong-born artist Samson Young, including a 3D-printed sculpture called Support Structures and a cement-based sculpture by the Shanghai-based Yu Ji. Dubbed Stones in Her Pocket, Yu""s piece looks like building materials fused into a boulder-like shape and left on a terrace, bound by safety ropes whose ends are fastened to the surrounding trees. It could be read as an attempt to connect natural and man-made objects.
Technical matters
Rene Meile, partner of Beijing and Lucerne-based Galerie Urs Meile, said he appreciated the chance to participate in Art Basel OVR:2020, although the invitation came at a short notice.
"We had three weeks"" notice to submit projects, which is a very tight deadline there were many artists we couldn""t consider from the beginning because they didn""t make enough works this year," he adds.
What ended up on the gallery""s virtual walls were paintings by emerging Chinese artist Ju Ting, known for manipulating and modeling thick layers of acrylic paint on a wooden panel. Collectors also got a chance to view the artist at work in her Beijing studio as well as given a tour of her most prized creations during a Zoom live chat.
Meile feels the new live-chat function is a substantial improvement on the version used in past fairs. Many art galleries participating in virtual art fairs are still trying to work out how to make best possible use of new technology. Some buyers, meanwhile, have cited color and size discrepancies between the art pieces seen during online viewing and the images of the same received as part of an email attachment.
"Colorful paintings are straightforward. Installations and sculptures are obviously harder," says Meile. He believes "art forms may narrow down to only the ones that work online," if COVID-19 persists and international art fairs remain limited to the virtual space for a while. Such a situation does not augur well for young and unknown artists, he says.
"We have a couple of established artists but also a lot of young, emerging ones who are still at the beginning of their careers. It""s much more difficult if people don""t know them and haven""t seen their works in a physical space - it""s just a bigger risk to buy something of theirs," says Meile.
Up and coming
Not unexpectedly, the sale of new art has taken a nosedive since COVID-19 moved much of art trading to the virtual space. The first six months of 2020 saw gallery sales fall by 36 percent on average compared to that during the same period last year, according to The Art Market 2020 survey by Art Basel and UBS. Though shares of online sales rose 37 percent in the same period, among the high-net-worth collectors surveyed, 41 percent focused on galleries they had previously purchased from or had relationships with, and only 14 percent were actively looking for new galleries to buy from.
Art Basel OVR:2020 yielded considerably fewer reported sales than their previous online editions, according to ArtNet News. The slowdown was attributed to viewing-room fatigue or galleries holding back information.
On the positive side, increased online and social media activity on the part of art galleries in the recent months has attracted younger collectors. Seventy percent of the millennial collectors surveyed reported that the pandemic has enhanced their interest in collecting art.
Albertini of Massimo de Carlo feels sales might pick up if gallerists made information more readily available, especially when displaying works by emerging artists as well as relatively-less online-friendly art forms such as sculptures or immersive pieces. Massimo de Carlo let four up-and-coming galleries in Milan to use their website to help widen their audience base.
"It""s true that galleries with younger artists carry a bigger burden and have suffered more during the pandemic; but there""re also attempts to help one another out," says Albertini. "We""re working on technologies like 3D scans that can better present things like video art, or 3D objects."
Meile appreciates Art Basel""s efforts in organizing VIP tours for collectors. Frieze debuted Focus, a new channel turning the spotlight on galleries that are 12 years old or younger.
As COVID-19 shows no signs of slowing down, gallerists, art dealers, collectors and artists have been trying hard to stay relevant by trying to improve the online experiences they create for the audience. Evidently, we have not seen the last of such experiments with building virtual bridges between artist and collector.