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Kyoto Journal announces it´s relaunched website with a free download of a digital issue of the journal.
Kyoto Journal now publishes both in print and digitally
Touched deeply by the spiritual and cultural heritage of this ancient capital, a small community of journalists, poets and artists founded Kyoto Journal in 1987 to share their discoveries with the world.
Today their “heartwork” continues: Kyoto Journal is now a non-profit, online magazine serving as a gateway to Asia, featuring insightful writing, photography, art and translations.
The magazine engages with subjects as diverse as the history of tea, sacred mountains, Japanese garden design, anti-nuclear art, engaged Buddhism, HIV-Aids in Cambodia, Kyoto crafts, satoyama landscapes and much more.
The new website offers regular online features, a rich collection of KJ classics, listings of the 75 print issues and practical information about Kyoto.
Please visit the website: KyotoJournal.org
Pictures courtesy of Kyoto Journal.
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Most financial consultants wouldn´t advice you to invest in arts and antiques, unless you are familiar with it and you´d only invest a small proportion of your portfolio.
Fine and antique Asian arts are considered as long term investments. And whether or not profits are gained in the long run, is still not garanteed for any objects.
But on the contrary, there are tremendous wins for some Asian art objects. Gilt Buddhist bronzes acquired in the 80ies or 90ies might be sold for prices considerably higher today. Price ranges from ten to sixty thousand Euros for the same object are even possible within one year in two different auctions.
Objects with highly increasing prices are highlights
within masses of collectables and antiques thrown on the market in recent years.
Here are some examples of how art experts and collectors anticipate price developments in order to gain profits from their investments:
- An expert aquires and deepens knowledge about a specific area of expertise. This enables him or her to consider any buying or selling activity on a wider basis of experience and knowledge. He or she can decide about achievable prices for art objects and therefore predict price races in auctions. Such an expert is able to gain profits from his or her advanced knowledge about objects and prices.
- Collectors focus on special groups of objects. It is easy to find any good looking single piece. But it is hard to find a collection of quality objects. Some collectors try to anticipate trends and to be the first one to collect specific groups of objects. In some cases, collectors even publish catalogues about their collection or lend pieces to museums. But beware, defining a new field of collection is a costly process in terms of times and money.
- Another strategy is to collect art objects at a specific quality and price level. This was successfully shown by the British Rail Pension Fund, who reached an average rate of return of 11,8% p.a. in a timespan of 23 years. The investment strategy was defined by a simple rule: Get the very top level objects available on the market – if they are the best today, they will certainly rise in future. But even for small investors, this strategy is fairly attractive: Get the best object, which you can get for the amount of money you´d want to spend.
- Acquire a collection at once. This strategy can be very successful, but it requires patience and market knowledge. The buyer looks for opportunities, in which complete collections are offered at one time, for example at auctions. The normal market reaction would be a selective buying of the best pieces out of the collection. If a buyer acquires every single pieces of the collection, the good quality ones as well as the lower quality ones, an increasing of prices is psychologically stimulated. The fact that the collection was completely sold, will stimulate marked demand. If the same collection is offered again at a later point, maybe in another setting at another place, it will be considered as highly desireable.
- Go with economic development. This simple rule emphasises on the fact, that people from economically rising countries increasingly spend money for their cultural relics. Japan and China are the best examples for this. At times, when Japanese economy was on top, Japanese arts and antiques were sold for considerably high prices all over the world. But since Japan is faced with economic threads, Japanese collectors stopped investing in their art objects. Therefore, prices for Japanese antiques decreased. On the contrary, Chinese art prices increased as much as Chinese economy rose and made more and more people rich, who naturally started to spread their investments.
Pictures courtesy of Wikimedia Commons.
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In today´s technological environment one easily beliefs business columnists who optimistically promote the predictability of art price developments.
If technology makes arts and antiques finally comparable,
their price developments will be predictable.
Art price databases are generally accepted because of a general believe in technical means. Even in China, a country where reliable common standards often are hardly realized, more and more efforts are made to get reliable data about art sales prices.
Most people believe, that if it is possible to technically analyse stock market developments, the same should be possible with art and antiques. The only thing that is required for technical analysis is comparability of art objects.
So how do you compare antique paintings, porcelains, works of art, jades, bronze sculptures etc. from different regions of Asia and different periods of time?
The answer is obvious: These objects have got to be described in ways, which make them comparable and usable in data bases. Once again, objects from cultural history are going to be pressed into digital data.
When that is done you might have a technical analysis of future price developments of say Kangxi blue and white porcelain bowls, then the world of arts and antiques will be finally interesting for technical money investors.
What happens to commodity markets at the moment will then happen to art objects in general. They will become objects of capital investment. There will certainly be a recognizable impact of technical developments on art prices for Asian antiques. In some regards, this is already observable in the areas of oil paintings and contemporary arts.
Pictures courtesy of Till Spurny.
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Patan or Lalitpur is one of the three great cities of the Kathmandu Valley. It is called “Yala” by its inhabitants, the Newars. This ethnic minority has specialized in modelling and casting of antique Buddhist bronzes in the Himalayan region since many centuries.
Newaran bronze sculptures belong to the finest in the world
Established in 1997, the Patan Museum opens its showrooms to public visitors in the historic center of Patan city. Lalitpur is translated with “the city of fine arts” and it is the place, where the heart of Nepal´s cultural heritage is still beating today.
The exhibition comprises a large variety of religious art objects and antique relics. There are more than 200 exhibits constantly on display, which represent different periods and stylistic developments of early Hinduism and Buddhism, as well as a focus on metal technology.
Anyone who knows about the importance of Buddhist bronze manufactors from Lalitpur on the development of Buddhism in the Himalaya region, should take an opportunity to visit Patan museum. It is a place, where an important cultural heritage is preserved “on site” in Asia, not in a great Museum in Europe or in the USA.
Actually, there are many museums in Western countries, which could easily donate sculptures or relics to the museum belonging to Patan or Kathmandu region.
Go to: Patan / Lalitpur Museum – Nepal
Pictures courtesy of Patan Museum.
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The “face of majesty” or “face of glory” is seen everywhere all around Asia. The “monster mask” might be used as an ornament on antique Chinese bronzes dating back even to the pre-Buddhist dynasties Shang and Zhou. In Chinese art history, it is called taotie-decor or -mask, but it has got an equivalent in the Kirtimukha (Skr.), which derives from ancient Indian history.
Jalandhara demom devoured his own body until only the head remained
Throughout the whole of China, as well as in India and South East Asia, the smiling taotie-mask can be found as guardian of doorways. Also in the Himalayas the monster mask is extensively shown on temple walls, hanging banners, archways and as door handles and knockers.
According to a Hindu legend from the Skandha Purana, Kirtimukha derives from a demon called Jalandhara, who once has been created from the blaze of Shiva´s third eye. The demon devoured his own body until only the head remained.
Shiva named him Kirtimukha and bid him to remain for all eternity as a guardian to the threshold of his door.
Images courtesy of wikimedia commons.
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Vinay Kumar Rao observed women in early Indian Buddhist sculptural art in various dimensions. He does not agree with a general perception, that women did not receive the same rights as men in early Buddhism. Buddhism by contrast never restricted the educational opportunities of women and accepted them as being capable to achieve similar goals as men.
Indications about gender roles and relations in early Buddhism
The study takes a close look at Buddhist sculptural art and also textual inscriptions from the second and third century B.C. in India. The book “Women in Buddhist art” gives us indications about gender roles and relations in early Buddhist societies. It is a great research work, recommendable not only for anyone interested in BUddhist art, but also friends of cultural studies.
Vinay Kumar Rao´s study looks at women in the perspective of divinity an natur, as well as women performing religious activities, then focusses on women expressing her feminine desires, heading forewards to women in daily life, and finally examining dresses and ornamants.
The author added an extensive appendix about women in early Buddhist inscriptions and also a very informative glossary, in which many important words and names in Buddhist art are described.
Please follow this link for more information: Agamkala Prakashan
Images courtesy of Agamkala Prakashan
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In Tibetan buddhist art, the skull is a widely used iconographic symbol. It may appear on sculptures and paintings in form of garlands or necklaces of skulls, five-skull crowns or single skulls.
Necklaces of skulls, skull-crowns and a skull-lamp
A necklace of skulls is often worn by female buddhist deities. It usually shows grinning skulls painted in white. Such a necklace (munda mala) usually represents the female principle of emptiness. The skull´s four canine teeth are generally discribed as symbols of the biting through of the four maras (obstructives).
The five-skull crown in Tibetan buddhist art generally represents the undifferentiated union of the five buddhas (Tathāgatas). Often, each skull is surmounted by a jewel or a vajra. These five jewel finals are usually coloured to correspond to the five buddhas.
Single skulls appear in various forms and functions in Tibetan iconography. For example a skull-lamp, which burnes human fat, with its tongue burning as a wick, would be described as a purification symbol. The body (skull) is purified by the flames, as are speech (tongue) and mind (fat). This example derives from ancient Hindu cremation rituals.
Images courtesy of:
The British Museum
Musée Guimet
Field Museum of Natural History
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There is an ongoing discussion among Asian art experts, which emphasises the fact, that faked and reproduced Chinese antiques and porcelains currently appear in large amounts in auction houses globally.
Auction houses act on a caveat emptor principle: Let the buyer beware!
The idea of publishing a kind of a “Fake-Lot-Blacklist” is already being discussed among experts. Such a blacklist would show auction lots offered in different auction houses, which are believed to be fakes.
This would of course help anyone interested or semi-professional collectors, who are threatened to loose money when buying faked art objects. Especially in Chinese antiques such a list would be gratefully welcomed.
But how can it be, that there are so many faked antiques and replicas from China on the auction market, when global art market is getting increasingly transparent.
Shouldn´t globalization and digitalization of the art world automatically help erase such frauds and faked art objects?
Images courtesy of Wikimedia Commons
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What can you find on the internet and what on the street market? 78,6% of the North American population had access to the internet in 2012, but only 27,5% of the population in Asia.
Used to put everything online
Europeans and North Americans have got used to the internet in a way, that most people would expect to find any information online, if it´s a relevant information.
Any museum, every good gallery, auction house or art dealers would at least represent themselves online. Actually, a new trend in e-commerce for arts and antiques has already arisen.
But this shouldn´t hide the fact, that most people in the world do not have internetaccess and most street markets, flea markets, art markets, small little art dealers and galleries are not online.
If you are looking for real treasures, then look for them in the real world!
Images courtesy of Wikimedia Commons
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Artprice.com together with AMMA (the Art Market Monitor of Artron) publishes a free survey of the Asian and international art market development in 2012. There has been a significant decline in Chinese auction sales in 2012. Auction houses in China have witnessed the end of their golden age due to the erosion of the high-end art market, a significant drop in the number of sales and the downward revision of estimates.
The art market in China in 2012
In 2012, total sales in Chinese auction houses substantially dropped down 37.14% on the year before. Chinese fine art, including fine Chinese painting and calligraphy, oil painting and contemporary art, even dropped down 44.24% on 2011.
AMMA points out, that it sees one of the major reasons for this turn down in a general reluctance to sell among art collectors, greatly reducing the volume of artwork for sale. According to AMMA, one key feature of the 2012 Chinese art auction market has been monotony and a lack of highlights.
Chinese auction houses’ turnover went down especially for the two auction giants in China, Poly International Auction (down 48.39% on 2011) and China Guardian Auctions (down 53.15% on 2011). Beijing´s traditional auction house Hanhai even lost 75.89% of its annual turnover compared to 2011.
Market analysts generally tend to give a posivite interpretation of this development, emphasizing the idea, that this downturn can be regarded as a chance. Artprice.com states, that this period of readjustment in the Chinese art market should be viewed as an opportunity rather than as a setback.
Download or read the full market survey from artprice.com & AMMA (Art Market Monitor of Artron):
The Art Market in 2012
Go to: artprice.com
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The Walters Art Museum in Baltimore, USA, doesn´t have the size and publicity like the large museums in New York, London or Paris. But it has got an innovative approach regarding the use of online media in relation to its collection. Like many international art museums, Walters also put its collection data base online and presents the exhibits with pictures and short descriptions.
What are online databases of art museums good for?
On museum´s homepages, you often can search their collections, but there is no possibility to decide about relevance. The general visitor will not be pleased, if searching through thousands of objects and not knowing, which one is interesting, important or relevant for him.
There is a need for relevance definition services for online databases. Museums provide online tours, online curating or specific contextual frameworks to help navigate through their online collections.
The Walters Art Museum in Baltimore is forerunning in this field. Even if it doesn´t provide large online stories, audio and video tours, like other museums, it stands out, because it publishes all antique objects under the so called the Creative Commons Attribution-Share Alike 3.0 Unported License and the GNU Free Documentation License. This means, that images of art objects are allowed to circulate.
Walters Art Museum offers different “ways to browse” their collection, as they call it. You can navigate through objects according to their categories, dates, mediums and so forth, but also filter with “museum locations” or “community”. The latter shows some arrangements from registered users of their website, not unlike lists of favorite exhibits.
All this isn´t really the big solution yet, but these are examples of trying to find new ways of relevance definitions for online art databases.
Of course, there are still further ideas needed, which help to make large collections of antique and modern arts accessible on museum´s internet sites.
Go to: The Walters Art Museum
Images courtesy of The Walters Art Museum.
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The internet in China is stronger restricted than in the Western world. Yet, Chinese art websites are lively and diverse – in some regard they have got an even greater sense of freedom than art websites in Western countries.
But the Chinese internet also allows opportunities for liars and criminals. For internet visitors it is difficult to decide, whether information from Chinese websites is trustworthy or not.
In China, less than 15% of the country´s population enjoys access to the internet. Chinese art websites are generally loaded with information. Some of them offer extensive chatting and exchanging opportunities, which mostly requires registration and user verification.
The designs of Chinese art websites appear to be loud, confusing and need to get used to – at least, if you are used to the clear designs of internet hompages from European und USA galleries. But in a way, Chinese homepages seem to be the livelier ones.
There are very few copyright standards in the Chinese internet. Especially in the field of Chinese art and antiques, it is not possible for website visitors to decide, whether object descriptions and given informations are true or not.
This lack of reliability on Chinese art and antique homepages seems to open Pandora’s box. Chinese auction houses and galleries are invited to advertise with faked hammer prices and sales informations. Informations from Chinese websites are generally treated carefully on the international scene.
Here are some of the biggest art websites in China:
www.gucn.com, www.shyzgw.com, www.cang.com, www.fobao.cn, www.huaboli.com,
www.taaicn.com, www.baxia.com.cn
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Most advices from passionate collectors emphasise on true love for the art object, when buying a piece of art. Listen to your heart and only buy something, if you are really faszinated and in love with the objects – and do not buy only because of monetarily reasons – That´s a basic advice from art collectors.
Art buyers gain buyer´s professionalization
Long-term art collectors become experts in their areas of collection. And the reason for this is not only a passion for arts and antiques.
A reason for the need of developing expertise in art market lies in the natural intransparency of art market itself.
One and the same piece of art might be valued and sold at different prices, if offered at different places or occasions. To survive on the market and to avoid loss of money, there is a fundamental necessity for any collector to gain expert knowledge and to specialize in certain fields of interest.
It´s an amazing fact, that the need for buyer´s professionalisation is not limited to art market segments with a high amount of possible fakes and reproductions, like some areas in Asian arts. This seems to account for any area of art collecting.
Images courtesy of Brockhaus Germany.
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Located in the Indus Valley in Ladakh region of India, the Matho Monastery has been one of the most important Sakya Tibetan Buddhist centers at the foothills of the Himalayas since its establishment in 1410. During the centuries of its existence, many Buddhist art relics have been stored. The monastery´s collection consists of a great variety of important Buddhist relics, particularly Thangkas, Buddhist bronze statues and objects from monastic everyday life.
Restoration and preservation
Most of the monastery´s Buddhist art objects have been locked up in boxes for the last 30 years for protection, since Ladakh was opened to tourrisme. Therefore, the Matho Museum Project has been initiated to display this precious collection in a secure way. It is run by the the Himalayan Arts Preservation Association, the Good Karma Foundation and the Cultural and Welfare Soiety of Matho Monastery.
The project team includes internationally renowned art historians, restorers, architects and the monks from Matho monastery themselves, led by Lopön Tsering Dorje, the lama in charge of the religious Buddhist practice inside the monastery.
The Matho Museum Project will not only restore the artefacts and build a museum on the 15th century base of the monastery. It will create a sustainable economic base for the region by training a local restoration team in international restoration standards.
Some of the most prominent advisors of the project are:
Matthieu Ricard, Buddhist monk and French interpreter for H.H. the Dalai Lama.
Marion Boyer, curator of the Musée Elise Rieuf.
Götz Hagmüller, architect and urban conservationist.
Michael Henss, leading Tibetan and East Asian art historian.
Zara Fleming, lecturer and Buddhist art expert for Tibetan, Himalayan and Mongolian art.
For more information, donations or volunteering opportunities, please visit the project´s website and directly contact with:
The Matho Museum Project
Images courtesy of Matho Museum Project.
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