The trio behind the Art021 and Jingart fairs in Shanghai and Beijing are expanding their franchise to Shenzhen with a new art and design fair called Shenzhen Design and Art (DNA), scheduled from September 30 to October 4.
“Shenzhen is a migrant city, but [that] gives people the opportunity to build a new home,” Bao Yifeng, who founded Art021 in 2013 with David Chau and Kylie Ying, told the Art Newspaper, which broke the news.
The founders are also looking to launch art fairs in Chengdu, the capital of southwestern China’s Sichuan province, and on the island of Hainan, China’s southernmost point, where plans to open a freeport were announced last June.
Future targets for the fledgling fair project also include Hangzhou, an hour outside Shanghai, which is home to the China Academy of Art.
The Shenzhen fair will feature 40 galleries and take place at the Shenzhen Museum of Contemporary Art and Urban Planning. It will offer a blend art and design, with four sections dedicated to galleries, design, art on paper, and “curio”: contemporary works inspired by traditional Chinese scholar objects.
The event will not coincide with the Art Shenzhen fair, founded in 2013, which takes place earlier in September. Instead, it will overlap with the National Day of the People’s Republic of China holiday on October 1, which celebrates the formal establishment of the nation in 1949.
The hope is to have international exhibitors, but with travel restrictions still in place in China, that may not be possible.
While the pandemic caused the cancellation of Jingart in 2020, Art021 was one of the first art fairs to resume in-person operations when it opened in October 2020.
This year’s edition of Jingart opens today and continues through June 13. It has 43 booths plus 13 virtual exhibitors.
Despite last year’s lockdown, China saw a reduction of only .1 percent in its fine-art auction sales year over year, according to the Artnet Intelligence Report. The nation also overtook the U.S. for the largest share of the art market of any country.
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