Xiao Hong:
For how bad the economy is, i seem to always forget and have spent a TON of money here. My digital camera's screen broke during the journey to miami so of course i had to buy a new one. Le Baron at Delano has been an interesting affair but comes with high bar tabs. However, the single best thing that put me in a permanent good mood yesterday was buying my first painting, images are to come in a few days. I bought it from a japanese artist from tokyo named ANKEN KIDANI at GESAI fair (part of PULSE fair and organised by Takashi Murakami's imprint).
ABMB this year has pretty much met everyone's expectations, which were not set very high. Collector's are still here but negotiating for lower prices, galleries are still bringing their latest works, the all-day concert-like atmosphere is gone, galleries that aren't selling as much are justifying the costs of the fair as a price for creating networks and curating clients, and the free alcohol isn't flowing like a raging river on the brink of flooding.
I have tried to stay true to only seeing the fairs that were impressive last year: SCOPE, ABMB, PULSE, GESAI, AQUA WYNWOOD+HOTEL, NADA. The top reason being I will never see everything here and to try to do so would be dishonest to having a real look at the work. Even so, I can't help but admit that the large fairs this year feel like an 18th century French Salon: BIG IS GOOD. Hence, my images above are all large-scale works (well and that i feel incredibly uncomfortable taking flash photos of work at the booths). nonetheless, the scale is getting attention but the red dots have been going to sketches and small scale art.
The works from Japan and Taiwan are always mind-blowing, "next level shit" as a friend commented. Works from China seem to be selling briskly as well but the trend in china is common: work that stands somewhere between critical analysis of the government and china's exploding wealth and materialism. For this reason (or maybe the aforementioned visual overload), the works are blending together into a assembly-line of Mao, Mao, Mao, more Mao and references to money and mass production.
