This is not the $2million teapot. It is a more ordinary Ming plate sitting in a museum in Berlin. 400 years ago, it was affordable contemporary art.

Someone just spent $2,130,000 (more or less) to buy a teapot. It was sold by Sotheby's Hong Kong to London-based antique dealers Littleton and Hennessy, who made the staggeringly big bid "on behalf of an overseas collector."

I'm wondering now if that means that it's leaving China, or that it's going back to China -- the mainland. I suppose there are Ming porcelain collectors everywhere, but I read this alongside all those economic boom stories and I couldn't help but wonder.

The ornate, 10-inch, silver-mounted porcelain pot was made for a Chinese emperor in the 1500s and brought to England by an early explorer, who gave it to Queen Elizabeth I. On her deathbed, she gave it to her chaplain, Henry Parry, the Bishop of Worcester. At the time, the teapot would have been worth as much as a small house.

Alastair Gibson of Sotheby's auction house gives historical context: "You never saw porcelain in Europe then – it just didn't exist. Everything was dull and tawdry and people were mainly eating off metal."

Well, anyway, now, as then, buying the right sort of art in China seems to be quite the worthwhile investment. That's a link to an NYArts Magazine reprint of a Guardian article about how contemporary artists are bringing in boucoup bucks now that Charles Saatchi is buying 'em. He's a trendsetter. His website gets 4 million hits a day.

The life-sized resin figures are the work of Zhang Dali, one of China's leading artists. To highlight the role played by countryside labourers in his country's rapid urbanisation, Zhang took casts of 100 of them, substituted numbers for their names, signed the figures and offered them for sale like pieces of meat hung in a window.
Except, of course, they are a lot more expensive. Thanks to the booming market in Chinese art, the price for a single figure has doubled in the past two years to £10,000. That value is likely to increase further if they are shown at the opening of Charles Saatchi's new gallery in the King's Road this year.
Saatchi snapped up 15 of Zhang's Chinese Offspring in a shopping spree that has also seen him spend more than a million dollars each on two huge paintings by Zhang Xiaogang, the hottest property in the Chinese contemporary art scene, as well as works from at least 18 of his compatriots.

(Bold is mine.) Not all contemporary art is selling for thousands of dollars -- you can find decent stuff (like, not mass-produced, not done-just-for-tourists) for a couple hundred bucks or so. I'm nearly as poor as a church mouse, and we came home with a funky painting from someone from Son (son!)'s hometown.

On the other hand, the folks named in that NYArts article are more likely to make some collectors some big money.

Not mentioned in the above quotation are Fang Lijun, who owns restaurants in Beijing and a hotel in Yunnan, and Su Xinping, who's from Inner Mongolia. And other sources point me toward artists Huang Yong Ping and Shen Yuan, who both lived in Xiamen but moved to France a while back.

I mention them for those more well-off than I interested in participating in China's cultural and economic boom. And decorating their living rooms with things that aren't bamboo fans and silk scrolls.