by ANTONY OU
There is more than aesthetics and investment in today’s demand for Chinese art. Art has become an “invisible cloak” that helps businessmen navigate Chinese corruption .
increasingly valuable “commodities” for investors of both the East and West. Each year, the Spring and Fall sales of the three auction houses – Sotheby’s and Christie’s and the China Guardian – are flooded with gallery owners, artists, buyers and sellers. They are never surprised by the soaring prices and total turnover. Zhang Daqian (1899-1983), Fu Baoshi (1904-1965) and Qi Baishi (1864-1957) are the most frequently heard names in any auction houses. They are like Jackson Pollock, Vincent van Gogh and Pablo Picasso in western businessmen’s eyes, whose works sell for millions of dollars. For example, The painting “Lotus and Mandarin Ducks” by Zhang Daqian has just set the new record for Zhang at Southeby’s for 191 million Hong Kong dollars (over 24 million USD) this May.
Apart from appreciation and investment, it might be an alien concept for laymen outside the Chinese system that one of the most essential functions of art works is corruption. The concept of “elegant bribery”, or Yahui in Chinese, refers to the action and process of a systematic corruption that only involves cultural products and artefacts: antiques, rare plants, paintings and calligraphy as a medium of the crime. Art works, in particular, have become no more than tools of corruptions among officials, merchants, art dealers and sometimes even artists.
The history of elegant bribery can be traced back to ancient Chinese dynasties, and arguably, it has been an intractable problem since the Ming dynasty (1368-1644). Consider the case of the prime minister Yan Song (1480-1567) and his son Yan Shifan (1513-1565): they were notorious for corruption in general, and they were known to have received elegant bribes in particular. Eventually, the emperor confiscated all of their properties, and over 6000 pieces of invaluable calligraphy and paintings were found— most of them were bribes of their subordinates.
In this article, I am going to systematically lay out why and how Chinese people use art works as a medium of corruption. There are thousands of creative ways to accomplish this kind of corruption without the possibility of being caught. I will only focus on the most common ways of bribery, using Chinese paintings, via both auction houses and galleries.
The Reasons behind Elegant Bribery
There are at least three important reasons for people to “elegantly” bribe officials in exchange of contract deals, promotions and all sorts of advantages. First, comparing to other types of corruption, elegant bribery demonstrates the “taste” of both the bribers and bribees. Bribes such as stocks and apartments are good investments, but bribes of art works make them “look cool”. The bribed officials possess their very own private collections of certain famous painters or calligraphy works of ancient dynasties. The image of “private art collector” is a perfect symbol for one’s socio-economic status and, more importantly, vanity. Therefore, it turns out to be a norm that the bribers should know the “tastes” of their targeted bribees— what he/she likes— may it be Qi Baishi’s signature paintings of “prawns”, Xu Beihong’s (1895-1953) famous “galloping horses” in ink, or an ivory snuff bottle, carved with the 18 Buddhas at the mid-Qing Dynasty (1644-1911)?
OD for more
(Thanks to Robin Khundkar)