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主题: 传奇处处有,今天到她家。运来了,都推不走,嘻嘻
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作者 传奇处处有,今天到她家。运来了,都推不走,嘻嘻   
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文章标题: 传奇处处有,今天到她家。运来了,都推不走,嘻嘻 (2201 reads)      时间: 2014-11-07 周五, 23:30   

作者:ceo/cfo生活风情 发贴, 来自【海归网】 http://www.haiguinet.com

ART & AUCTIONS
The Art World’s High-Roller Specialist
How Xin Li became Christie’s secret weapon in selling masterpieces to Asian billionaires.

Nov. 6, 2014 5:50 p.m. ET
1 COMMENTS
In mid-October, Christie’s art expert Xin Li—a former professional basketball star and model from China’s Manchuria region—was escorting billionaire collectors through the Louvre in Paris. Days later, she popped up in Hong Kong to wine and dine tech millionaires at the auction house’s showroom. Now, Ms. Xin is in New York to field phone bids during the season’s major fall auctions, which started Tuesday and continue through next week.


“I’m never in one place for more than 10 days,” said the 38-year-old deputy chairman of Christie’s Asia. “I can’t be.”

Ms. Xin is a leading pla<x>yer in the art business’s central game right now: a race to match a small number of $10 million-plus masterpieces with a small number of mega-collectors, who are increasingly coming from Asia.



Over at Christie’s, the emphasis on blue chips is even more pronounced. Its Wednesday sale, where Ms. Xin said she may be bidding on at least a half-dozen major works, is estimated to bring in at least $600 million, the house’s highest-ever presale expectation. During the recession, these auction houses only offered a handful of $10 million-plus works across a two-week sale series. Next week, a quarter of Christie’s offerings are estimated to cross that bar—including examples by Warhol, Roy Lichtenstein, Francis Bacon, Cy Twombly, Franz Kline, Willem de Kooning and Jeff Koons.

The price increases matter because they are buoying the entire art market, experts say. Nearly $60 billion in art changed hands last year, second only to sales in 2007 and up 8% over 2012, according to art economist Clare McAndrew. “A significant part of the uplift of the market was due to higher-priced works, rather than simply more works sold,” she wrote in a March report.


That’s why the past few weeks have been a blur for Ms. Xin and the houses’ army of globe-hopping specialists, who have been sifting the ranks of the world’s wealthy to try to lock in enough interested bidders for each artwork on offer during these sales. Auctioneers say the search is part of the job, but skyrocketing prices have also pushed the stakes to historic levels: If a $300,000 drawing fails to sell at a marquee sale, no one besides the seller feels rattled. If a $40 million painting bombs, the entire art market shudders.

“We’re all feeling the pressure right now,” said Alex Rotter, Sotheby’s co-head of contemporary art world-wide. “Most of these big pieces deserve their prices, but is it a race to the buyer? Totally.”

Ms. Xin is one of the latest auction stars to emerge amid this high-stakes backdrop. Her profile rocketed after she helped her contemporary-art clients place bids or win half of Christie’s top 10 priciest works in May. Nearly 6 feet tall, she was easy to spot standing between colleagues in the saleroom’s phone banks, wielding three cellphones at a time and lobbing bids at a regular clip. By sale’s end, she helped her Chinese clients win as much as $236 million of art. François Curiel, a four-decade veteran of the firm, said he’s never seen one specialist account for that large a haul in a sale.

Ms. Xin’s quick ascent comes amid China’s expanding clout on the global art stage. Most specialists are art experts who build up a career doggedly over decades. Ms. Xin, however, never saw a work of art until she was 19. But since she joined the auction business nearly seven years ago, she has homed in on finding masterpieces—and collectors who could afford them. Now, her clients like restaurateur Zhang Lan tend to pay top dollar for whatever she recommends. Even Christie’s owner, François Pinault, has enlisted Ms. Xin to advise on his private collection of Chinese contemporary art.

Collector Susan Liu, who works for a New York hedge fund, said Ms. Xin’s specialty is teasing out aesthetic similarities between artists, East and West. She said Ms. Xin recently showed her a few gestural, black-and-white paintings by Abstract ex<x>pressionist Franz Kline, knowing that the collector admired the similarly vigorous brush strokes of Chinese calligraphy. With one glance, Ms. Liu said she “immediately felt connected” to Kline.

Currently, Ms. Xin focuses most of her attention on about five major Asian collectors who can each spend $100 million in a season on art. Most are women working as entrepreneurs or self-made billionaires in the fields of technology and banking. One of them said Ms. Xin often encourages her to rifle through auction catalogs and earmark any pieces that intrigued her. Ms. Xin follows up with candid opinions.


Given Ms. Xin’s performance in May, all eyes will invariably turn to her next week when bidding gets under way at Christie’s contemporary sale. She said she has been preparing for this pressure-cooker season for months—years, in fact. “I used to get up at 5 a.m. to go to play basketball in minus-30-degree weather,” she said. “I learned how to focus.”

From Basketball Star to Fashion Model
Soviet-style posters. That’s the closest thing to art that Ms. Xin saw growing up in Changchun, a car-manufacturing city with a population of 7.6 million in the northerneastern province of Jilin. The daughter of a biochemistry professor and a regional minister of sports, she spent most of her childhood looking at the inside of a basketball gym. The youngest of three, Ms. Xin was recruited by the state to play basketball at the age of 12. Her mother initially ob<x>jected, worried about Ms. Xin’s schooling, but her father approved, so long as she practiced harder than her teammates. She recalls him telling her, “If you do it, be the best of the best.”

She cut her hair short and stocked her closet with track suits and practiced seven hours a day, except Sundays, for two years straight. By the age of 15, she was deemed good enough to play professionally for the national junior basketball team, traveling across China and occasionally Russia. By the time she moved to Beijing for college, she was determined to follow her father’s footsteps into sports administration.

Then people started stopping her on the street. “You should model,” they would say. She didn’t know what they meant. Eventually, a friend handed her a copy of Elle, one of the first Western fashion magazines to break into the Chinese market. In 1995, as a college senior, she entered a beauty contest and made it to the Top 10. An agent said Ms. Xin had to go to Paris.

Xin Li with Diana Picasso ENLARGE

After graduating from college in 1995 with a degree in sports management, she arrived in Paris at the age of 20 with a two-week visa, a list of modeling agency addresses and enough money to buy a plane ticket home in case she failed. She proved a hit with fashion houses like Yves Saint Laurent and Givenchy who were seeking an “exotic Asian face,” she said, but she couldn’t speak French or English. She said she “didn’t speak for three months.”

Instead, she started going to museums. Here, suddenly, were vast, ornate halls of masterpieces. She reeled from the sumptuousness of it all, and in time expanded her set to the Musée D’Orsay, the Centre Pompidou, anything open and free. She called her mother and said she wasn’t moving home. She tried wine.

A few years later, modeling assignments took her to New York, and she began wandering around the Chelsea galleries near her apartment. “I had no idea what I was looking at, but it was different than anything I’d seen in museums,” she said. She made friends with artists and began traveling in fancier social circles.


After a dozen years of modeling, she found herself craving a new career, a wish she confided to a stranger during a New Year’s Day dinner on St. Bart’s island in 2008. Her newfound confidant was Diana Widmaier Picasso, the artist’s granddaughter. Ms. Widmaier Picasso, who once worked for Sotheby’s, said she urged Ms. Xin to go into the auction business. “Xin has a natural warmth,” she said. “I think collectors can sense that—and once they do, she can convince them to pay any price.”

Ms. Xin agreed to try, and within a month she had landed a trainee position at Sotheby’s, tasked with bringing in clients from Asia. She didn’t have an art degree, so she spent hours memorizing the names of top-selling artists and quizzing herself on their styles. When Mandarin-speaking collectors started cold-calling the auction house with questions about Old Master paintings, she crammed information on Rembrandt from the Internet and Christie’s library and called back.

She didn’t need lessons in navigating the nuances of Chinese culture, though—and that’s what every Western auction house in the world realized it needed as Chinese collectors began pouring into sales before and during the recession. In 2010, rival Christie’s went on a hiring spree, tripling its staff in China to 190 people. Ms. Xin was hired to be head of Asia business development. Sales to Asia jumped 111% to $721.9 million that year. Last year, Christie’s sales in Asia topped $977.5 million. Chinese buyers accounted for 22% of the house’s $7.1 billion sales overall, the house said.

From the outset, Ms. Xin said she knew her clients felt safer with name-brand artists like Picasso and Vincent van Gogh. But she started keeping her eye out for other Westerners to recommend. Sandy Rower, grandson of sculptor Alexander Calder and president of the Calder Foundation, said he took a scouting trip to China a few years ago to explore museums that might want to organize a Calder exhibit. Right away, he realized that Calder was considered too abstract to appeal to Chinese tastes. But Ms. Xin took him with her parents on a jaunt to the Great Wall and encouraged him to come back. She began calling him, seeking advice on the merits of various Calder sculptures in the marketplace. In May, one of her clients paid Christie’s $26 million for a Calder “Flying Fish.”

Ms. Xin, who is single, says she’s adopted a soft-sell approach. Rather than make a formal presentation about an artist to her collectors, she will send art books, documentaries about artists, or invitations to museum shows that feature artists she thinks a collector might like. She once mailed books on Italian modernist Giorgio Morandi, who is known for painting porcelain vases, to some collectors of Chinese porcelain. “My collectors have good taste so I encourage them to research and analyze what I send them. We learn together,” she said.

Some, like Ms. Zhang the restaurateur, have been collecting for years and have adventurous tastes. In May, Ms. Xin helped her buy an untitled self-portrait by Martin Kippenberger for $18.6 million. The work was only expected to sell for up to $12 million. In the same sale, the collector also paid $10.5 million for an Andy Warhol “Little Electric Chair.” Ms. Xin said she typically can’t speak about her clients’ purchases, but Ms. Zhang’s son divulged the details on social media.

For this latest round, Ms. Xin said her top clients asked her to investigate five or six pieces by different artists in Christie’s contemporary sale next week. She suggested that they look closer at a work by Twombly, an artist who isn’t a top seller in China yet. The work, which features his signature gestural loops, is estimated to sell between $35 million and $55 million. Whether they ask her to bid on anything is their call, not hers, she said.

Christie’s CEO Steven Murphy said that whatever happens, he’s grown to trust her instincts—wherever they lead her. “One time I called her and she was with four clients in Wisconsin, duck hunting,” Mr. Murphy said. “I assume they dressed well.”

作者:ceo/cfo生活风情 发贴, 来自【海归网】 http://www.haiguinet.com









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