Art Photography: A Market Ready to Bloom

The photos on display at September’s 2013 Tai­pei Art Photo Show at the Tai­pei Expo Dome were so compelling that you couldn’t help but stop and take each one in.

A series of enormous head-high portraits of stray dogs made for particularly heart-wrenching viewing. Facing euthanization, their skins ravaged by disease, the dogs held themselves with a sorrowful dignity. A few even appeared to be weeping.

The dog photos were from cutting-edge photographer Tou Yun-fei’s much-talked-about Memento Mori, a series of images described as revisiting classic portraiture using a contemporary vocabulary. The 38-year-old Tou, a graduate of the Rhode Island School of Design’s photography program, spent three years on the project, selecting just eight images from the more than 50,000 he shot. Media attention directed at his work helped focus public attention on animal rights issues in general and the stray dog problem in particular.

Tou was one of more than 50 artists exhibiting at the 2013 Tai­pei Art Photo Show. While the 2013 show inaugurated this particular event, the idea of using a photo expo as a venue for promoting a Taiwanese collectors’ market for art photos dates to five years earlier.

Taiwanese photographer Yang Che-yi captures the shattered spaces of mainland Chinese mines and quarries.

The history of large-scale photo trade fairs dates back to 1997’s Paris Photo, the first event to make photography independent of larger arts expos and currently the most important photo expo in the world.

Paris Photo differs from France’s other famous international photo expo, Les Rencontres d’Arles, in that it serves as a platform for dealers. The fair, which features exhibitors from 20 nations and 135 galleries, attracts more than 50,000 visitors every year. A tremendous success, it has fostered the development of the collectors’ market for art photography in Europe, and given rise to emulators in major cities around the globe, including both London and New York.

When Beijing Photo borrowed the Paris Photo model in 2008, it triggered an explosion of Asian photo fairs. Soon, Seoul, Singapore, Tokyo all leapt into the fray. Sensing a business opportunity, H.K. Chang, founder of Tai­pei’s Galerie Grand Siècle, organized the first Photo Tai­pei in 2009.

Wang Jun-jieh, who curated the event, invited 32 galleries from Europe, the US, Australia, mainland China, Japan, and Taiwan to participate. The show offered photography lovers in Taiwan a chance to see works by the likes of Japanese photographers ­Daido Mo­ri­yama and No­bu­yoshi ­Araki at first hand. It also featured work by Taiwanese photographers such as ­Chuang Ling, Quo Ying-­sheng, ­Chang Chao-tang, Shen Chao-­liang, and Chou ­Ching-hui.

That first Photo Tai­pei welcomed the participation of new media artists, attracted 4–5,000 visitors, and became a topic of much discussion within the photographic community. It also introduced the Taiwanese public to the notion of photography fairs.

Chuan Hui-hua, who set up specialist exhibition organizer TAC in 2013, sees art photography as a creative-cultural industry.

In 2010, the owners of two Taiwanese photography galleries, TIVAC’s ­Chuan Hui-hua and 1839 Contemporary Gallery’s Edward Chiu, decided to launch an even bigger exhibition and organized the first Taiwan Photo Fair.

Chiu, the organizer of the 2013 event, says that they’ve positioned Taiwan Photo Fair as an international event, and therefore always invite international heavyweights to exhibit. The 2013 show, for example, featured American photographer Jock Sturges and Japanese photographer Tai­shi Hi­ro­kawa. Asian photographers accounted for roughly half of the participants.

“Our strategy has been to grow the show in a gradual, orderly fashion,” says Chiu. “At the outset, we sought to increase interest in collecting photos by inviting well known foreign photographers to exhibit. We then slowly moved into providing collectors with guidance on domestic artists with potential.” Chiu adds that right now local collectors are very much interested in old photos with historical significance, and are infatuated with Japanese artists.

­Chuan Hui-hua had a different objective in mind when he arranged the first Taipei Art Photo Show in September 2013.

“Photography isn’t just an art; it’s a piece of a larger creative-cultural industry. Arts management, auctioning, framing, photography publishing, and so on: together they form a complete production chain.” ­Chuan notes that photographic collections and handmade limited-edition books were very popular with visitors to the 2013 Tai­pei Art Photo Show. In fact, Taiwanese artist ­Huang Wen-yung sold all five copies of his NT$30,000 handmade, limited-edition book. Sebastião Salgado, a Brazilian social documentary photographer who shot to fame with his photos of the 1981 attempt on US president Ronald Reagan’s life, even sold a copy of Genesis. Priced at NT$100,000 per copy and limited to a global production run of just 2,500, the book documents 30 trips Salgado made over a span of eight years.

Edward Chiu, owner of 1839 Contemporary Gallery, says that ­talented photographers can attract interest from domestic ­collectors by first exhibiting their work overseas.

Photo fairs also function as a means of bringing photographers into contact with professional arts managers and auctioneers.

Take Tou Yun-fei, for example. In 2012, he was so busy arranging exhibitions and fielding lecture requests that he had almost no time left for his art. He says that if galleries could handle administrative tasks like arranging his attendance at expos and managing his sales, he’d be happy paying commissions as high as 50%. Tou’s work happened to be “discovered” at Tai­pei Art Photo Show by Dutch gallery owner Per van der Horst. That led to an invitation to exhibit his Memento Mori series at PAN Amsterdam 2013, which resulted in introductions to international collectors.

Yang Che-yi, a photographer of the younger generation, agrees that management can be very helpful to artists, and says that professional galleries’ recommendations on positioning are also useful.

The 32-year-old Yang is currently working on a PhD in environmental systems engineering at National Taiwan University. He began taking photos of Taiwanese-invested mines in mainland China in 2006, spending three years shooting what was to become his Landscape series. Along the way, he developed his “new landscape” style, which examines the impact of human economic activities on the environment from a sociological perspective. His photos investigating capitalism and globalization have turned him into a hot commodity in mainland Chinese and Taiwanese photography circles and many now reside in museums in Taiwan, mainland China, and Japan.

In Memento Mori, Taiwanese photographer Tou Yun-fei captures the solemn expressions of dogs facing euthanasia. Tou’s series of canine portraits calls attention to the plight of Taiwan’s strays.

But Taiwan is still new to the idea of collecting photos, and the recent fairs are, in a sense, simply preliminary exploratory forays into the market. Tai­pei’s eight photo fairs over the last five years have each generated just NT$4–5 million in transactions. Collectors at the fairs have been paying an average of NT$20–50,000 per photo—versus the millions that oil paintings can sell for—and have shown little buying interest at prices over NT$100,000.

The relatively low value of transactions discourages galleries from exhibiting, which has consequences for the fairs. Photo Tai­pei is a case in point: lack of vendor interest caused it to be suspended in 2013, its fifth year of existence.

The market for collectable photographs so far remains relatively small for a number of reasons, including the state of the economy as a whole, the basic level of appreciation of art photos, and attitudes towards photography as an art. But the main reason is that buyers have doubts about the exclusivity of prints.

Chiu says that most people think of photographs as duplicates, but argues that this isn’t quite accurate. He explains that while photographs, like prints, videos, and sculptures, can be duplicated, artists carefully limit the number of copies they make to alleviate collectors’ concerns about the uniqueness of their purchases. The result is that photographs are usually printed in two or three sizes, and limited to runs of no more than 20 prints.

Taiwan Photo Fair exhibited Jock Sturges’ oversized collection ­Familiar.

Even though the local collectors’ market isn’t yet mature, a number of people have observed that galleries have been holding more photographic exhibitions over the last few years, at least two or three per year.

“The market is still being created,” says Chiu. “It will be much more mature in five years.” The fact that contemporary Taiwanese artists such as Wu Tien-­chang and Chen ­Chieh-jen are garnering international attention for their use of photographic media, and that Japanese photographer Hi­ro­shi Su­gi­moto drew crowds and sold several works at his talk at 2012’s Art Tai­pei, clearly indicates that there is potential for fine-art photography collecting in Asia.

“The market for photographic works and collections has been heating up all over the world. Information on the market in Taiwan isn’t so readily available, but single photos have been generating returns of 20–30%, and prices have been rising steadily every year,” says ­Chuan. Speaking as a gallery owner—he owned TIVAC for 14 years—­Chuan is very optimistic about the market’s outlook.

Works by contemporary Taiwanese masters such as ­Chang Chao-tang, ­Chuang Ling, and Quo Ying-­sheng have been appearing at Asian auctions, but they aren’t the only ones attracting attention. In fact, collectors have also been showing interest in pieces by mid-career artists such as Shen Chao-­liang, a one-time social documentary photographer who has more recently turned to contemporary photography.

Photography critic ­Chang May-ling believes that for all that the market can provide artists with the support they need to create, artists have to be careful not to let it dictate the direction of their art.

“Photographs quickly become dated, and 99% of them will see their prices decline,” says Tou. “I tell all my buyers, if you’re thinking only of making money, you’d be better off buying stocks.” Tou believes the impetus to create doesn’t originate with the market, but grows instead from an inner yearning. He argues that this is what collectors should respond to. “Don’t collect art in hopes of generating investment returns. Do it because it moves you.”

Photo Taipei in 2009 was the first of what has become a slew of Taiwanese art photography fairs. Pictured here is Chen Maozhang’s On Photography.