Messy Business: Chinamaxxed?

 Joan Mitchell's La Grande Vallée VII sold for HK$137,350,000 / US$17,608,974 (with fees) at Sotheby's Hong Kong this spring - the most expensive work by a woman artist ever sold at auction in Greater China, at a sale that came in 60% up on the same period last year. Not bad for an art market that peaked at $20bn in 2011, then the world's largest by auction turnover, and finished 2025 at $8.5bn, limping along, per the 2026 Art Basel and UBS Art Market Report. The rebound is real, but uneven. Gallery Weekend Beijing (GWB) marks its tenth edition this May with 30 participating galleries – the event is a useful barometer of who is buying now, at what prices, and why the middle of the market looks nothing like the top. René Meile, director of Gallery Urs Meile’s Beijing space, notes: “The pandemic changed everything. People who would normally travel internationally, visiting fairs and shows all over the world – were locked into China and started looking more at what was happening domestically.” 

The boom years

During the 2010s, Hong Kong and China’s collectors revitalised a global art-market reeling from the Great Recession. Flush with cash from property and stock-market booms, a new collector class - anchored by figures such as Wang Wei and Liu Yiqian (Long Museum) and Lin Han (M Woods) - generated record prices for both Chinese and international artists and triggered a private museum boom. As Meile says: “Anyone interested in contemporary art worldwide felt they had to go to China at least once to understand it." 

However, Mainland collectors have both increased in number and are skewing more Millennial and digital: auction house China Guardian's buyer base has quadrupled since 2015, and buyers under forty now represent over a third of the room; Poly Auction's online sales doubled to $79m in 2025. The Mishcon de Reya and ArtTactic China Art Market Report 2026 reported total volumes at a ten-year high of 22,247 lots, sustained by a 20% increase in online sales. There is an important caveat: at the Mainland auction houses, only 42% of lots sold above RMB 10 million (around $1.5m) had been fully settled as of May 2025. High-spending collectors are delaying or defaulting on payments for the most expensive works. In Hong Kong, internationally-focused auction houses including Sotheby’s, Christie’s and Phillips fared less well, with the market declining five percent year on year.

Ni Youyu, Dawn’s Bells and Dusk’s Drums, 2026 (installation view, Galleria Continua). Courtesy the artist and Galleria Continua

The missing middle

 More sales, lower prices, younger participants. For Meile, the shift can be explained thus: "For works up to around $30,000–50,000 there’s much more activity there than at the $200,000–400,000 level, which has become a lot slower. A lot of Chinese artists in that middle price range almost disappeared, their markets have crashed completely. They had buyers, rather than collectors, who just had a lot of cash, and I think they disappeared." Galleria Continua, which opened in Beijing’s 798 district in 2006 as the first international gallery to open in China, has seen the shift too. Founder Lorenzo Fiaschi recalls: “The market crisis, for me, was about content. Fifteen years ago, there was a boom in Chinese painting at auction. But it's difficult to make important historical art just using painting when you have the whole history from the Middle Ages, the Renaissance, Picasso, abstraction behind you. Sun Yuan and Peng Yu [the artist couple, active since 2000] are more deeply connected to art history [for me].”

 Collectors are often drawn to artists of their own generation. As Meile notes "You have older collectors – born in the 1960s and 70s – who collected that same generation of artists. A lot of them have been filtered out. And then you have this younger crowd who naturally collect their own generation. However, their tastes have changed: “A lot of young people came back in 2022 from studying abroad in London, New York, wherever. The impact that had on the scene was quite substantial, considering that it's a rather small scene.” Aria Yang, GWB’s Millennial program director and an art collector herself, adds: “Beijing’s collectors - many of whom are my peers – are research-driven. They do not buy on impulse; they buy based on depth and long-term alignment."

What’s on the walls

 The programme reflects the new collector profile: younger, internationally educated, post-medium. Among the standouts: Bonian Space's Shen Tongzhou (b. 2003), whose father was an e-sports player and who works across painting, video and spatial installation, is one of the youngest artists on view. At SPURS, Payne Zhu (b. 1990, Shanghai) presents a 12-channel video installation that treats AI as a new intelligence born not from desire but from digestion, an “Anal Intelligence”. And at Galerie Urs Meile, Yan Bingqian (b. 1983) records daily emotional states - anxiety, insomnia, elation - in tempera on wood panel, the figures stripped of legible gender or age.

Yan Bingqing, And Thus It Goes, 2026 (installation view, Galerie Urs Meile). Courtesy the artist and Galerie Urs Meile

Looking inward

Non-Chinese artists are conspicuous by their near absence, with only three presentations. The most striking is French artist Fabrice Hyber's paintings at ShanghART, framed as an act of mourning for Yu Kongjian – the Chinese landscape architect and Hyber's late friend who died in a plane crash last year and whose ‘sponge city’ philosophy shaped Hyber’s work. Tang Contemporary is showing 23 international artists, Apichatpong Weerasethakul and Adel Abdessemed among them, but even that feels like an outlier. The numbers confirm what the programme implies: on the mainland, Chinese artists represented 89.3% of auction sales value last year per Mishcon de Reya and Art Tactic. As Yang notes: “There is a profound self-reliance and intellectual depth to Chinese contemporary art, with works that completely bypass Western artistic paradigms. It is not ‘catching up' to global trends, but defining its own internal history and cultural values." Deglobalisation is happening in the Chinese art market too.

Gallery Weekend Beijing has grown considerably since its founding by Berlin-based artist and writer Thomas Eller in 2016, when it comprised just 14 galleries, as a private initiative. "That's very difficult to do in China,” Meile acknowledges. “When you have the government really trying to push something, it creates something different. They have authority over all the galleries - basically, they say we're going to do it, and you do it. If it's an official thing, it creates more noise." Art and culture, then, as a way of drawing visitors and increasing tourism.

The history gap

 Given the relatively small number of public museums – Shanghai’s Power Station of Art and  M+ in Hong Kong are exceptions – there is a reliance on galleries and private initiatives to provide historical perspectives. PIFO's century-spanning painting survey traces a line from the revolutionary era to the present; HdM pairs new works by Song Ling with a landmark 1990s work; Tokyo Gallery + BTAP frames a 35-year relationship between Sui Jianguo and gallery director Tabata Yukito as an example for intra-Asian dialogue. At Eslite, Lu Liang's (b. 1975)  paintings of industrial northwest China  trace the rapid transformation of the region. Flanking the dealer programme, UCCA Center for Contemporary Art is showing filmmaker Yang Fudong and painter Duan Jianyu, and SONG Museum  is showing works by figurative painter Qin Qi. As Meile notes: "There is an absence of independent institutions evaluating artists and doing cross-generational education. Many younger people who don't know about artists who were active ten to fifteen years ago."

However, this may be changing: “I strongly believe that Beijing is the place in terms of where the critical discourse [in China] is happening. Everything is a little bit hidden - that's also the style in Beijing, with the central government there. As an artist, you can be tucked away in your studio but also be where professionals are.” Yang agrees: “Beijing is the cultural and decision-making capital of the Chinese artworld – not a marketplace for quick transactions but a place of rigorous critique. If you want to build relationships with China’s most serious collectors, you have to be here.”

Aria Yang, Programme Director, GWBJ. Courtesy Gallery Weekend Beijing

Enter Shenzhen

China is pushing to expand its cultural centres beyond Beijing and Shanghai. The end of May saw sees the opening of the 135,000 sq m, $350m Shenzhen International Museum of Art (SIMoA), funded by the municipal government, with not one but seven exhibitions ranging from Chinese historical bronzes to European Renaissance and contemporary art. Two Chinese tech companies, Tencent and JD.com are opening multi-million-dollar museums in the city next year. However, as Meile sees it, “Shenzhen is like the gold rush – the city barely existed thirty years ago, the average resident is thirty-two, and there’s not really an art scene yet. It’s not Beijing.”

So has the art market “Chinamaxxed”? Not really. The global narrative about China has changed faster than the art market. The recovery in the middle market is real, driven by a new generation of collectors focused on mostly local artists – but it is a volume business, with a return to the high-price environment of the 2010s unlikely for now.  As Yang notes "The speculative bubble of previous years has cleared, which is a necessary step for maturation. What remains is a highly educated, rational generation of collectors who view themselves as cultural stewards. It is a slower process, but infinitely healthier for the long term."

Gallery Weekend Beijing runs until May 31st