The market for Vincent van Gogh’s paintings has seen a significant growth in China in recent years. Of the seven most expensive Van Gogh paintings sold at auction, at least three went to Chinese buyers from mainland China, Hong Kong, and Taiwan in the past nine years, fetching over $60 million each.
The first known major Chinese purchase of a Van Gogh painting was Vase with Poppies and Daisies, which was bought by Chinese entertainment company founder and artist Wang Zhongjun at Sotheby’s in 2014 for $62 million. The painting hung in his Hong Kong residence, and it’s unclear whether he still owns it.
In 2015, The Avenue of Les Alyscamps, an Arles landscape, was bought for $66 million by Taiwanese gallery owner Robert Wu at Sotheby’s. It’s believed that he may have been bidding for an unidentified Chinese collector.
Labourer in a Field, completed in September 1889 and showing a stylised view from Van Gogh’s bedroom window at the asylum just outside Saint-Rémy-de-Provence, sold for $81 million at Christie’s in 2017, going to an anonymous Chinese buyer.
Another painting among the ten most expensive Van Goghs at auction was Young Man with a Cornflower, sold at Christie’s in 2021. Although the buyer remains anonymous, bidding from Chinese collectors almost certainly pushed up the final price to $47 million.
Marie Laureillard, a lecturer in Chinese studies in Lyon, suggests that the growing love for Van Gogh in China may be explained by the Chinese fascination with his personality. They perceive his madness in a positive way, considering it a sign of the famous creator’s sheer genius.
Since the 1980s, there have been major shifts in the market for Van Goghs. In the first few decades, the main buyers were American, along with some Europeans. The Japanese entered the market in the 1980s, marked by the acquisition of one of the versions of Sunflowers in 1987 by the Tokyo-based Yasuda insurance company. Since 2000, new emerging markets for Van Gogh’s work have opened up, particularly among Russians, Koreans, and above all, the Chinese.
In 2021, Sotheby’s became the first auctioneer to sell a Van Gogh in East Asia. The still life, Vase with Gladioli, was offered at their Hong Kong branch, fetching HKD 71 million ($9.1 million). It’s unknown who the buyer was, but they were likely local.
It’s now common for Van Gogh paintings auctioned in London and New York to be toured to Hong Kong to be displayed or privately shown to potential clients a few days before the sales. This happened last month with Christie’s Head of a Woman (Gordina de Groot) (March-April 1885), which then sold in London to an anonymous buyer for £4.8 million, considerably above the £1m-£2m estimate.
Another indication of wider Chinese interest in Van Gogh is the National Gallery’s marketing of its current touring exhibition, Botticelli to Van Gogh: Masterpieces from the National Gallery. The exhibition is now at the Shanghai Museum and then goes to Seoul’s National Museum of Korea, and the main promotional image is Van Gogh’s Long Grass with Butterflies.
