Collectors visit the pre-exhibition held before a Christie's auction in Paris. [Photo / China Daily]

Record purchases by Chinese collectors keeps market humming with activity and cash registers ringing.

Prestigious auction houses Sotheby's and Christy's both recently released 2010 results, revealing blockbuster numbers despite a worldwide recession. In fact, Christie's numbers broke records for the 245-year-old company - and both auction houses reported huge gains in the Asian market. According to Kevin Ching, chief executive officer of Sotheby's Asia, the contribution of Asia sales to Sotheby's worldwide sales grew to 16 percent in 2010, from 5 percent in 2004. Christie's annual report, released in late January, indicated sales of $5 billion worldwide, an increase of 53 percent from 2009. Christie's autumn 2010 sale alone reached $414 million, a 95 percent increase from the year before and a record sale for any international auction house in Asia, says Jonathan Stone, managing director of Christie's Asia division, in an interview with China Daily.

"The Chinese art market is probably growing faster than any other country's art market," Stone says. Asian buyers also spent more in the Western market, he says. Spending by the collectors from the Chinese mainland grew by 116 percent worldwide between 2008 and 2009, and even more between 2009 and 2010, he says.

Ching reports similar gains for Sotheby's. The number of buyers from China who purchased objects worth $500,000 or above from Sotheby's increased by almost 400 percent between 2004 and 2009, Ching says.

"Part of the reason is that art, jewelry, watches and wine are increasingly seen as a viable investment, and compared to other asset classes, are seen as more tangible and a stable store of value," Stone says.

"Inflation and the political instability around the globe have caused the Asian collectors to look more closely at art as an alternative investment," Ching says. "The relatively unaffected Asian economy outside Japan, coupled with the Chinese buyers' wealth, contributes to the persistent, strong art market."

Related readings:  Artprice: China's art auction revenue ranks No 1  Collectors in high spirits  Looking beyond paintings  Lens turned on high art

Morgan Long, head of art investments for the Fine Art Fund, an international investment group, reports that the largest boom has been in Chinese antiquities.

"There's been a massive jump in the number of people (in China) putting their money into art," she tells China Daily. "There's been a lot of interest in bringing Chinese pieces back to China, in bringing heritage home. People are interested in pieces that have been scattered around the globe over the last hundreds of years, and new millionaires and billionaires want to put their money into something that's viewed as historically important."

She estimates that 90 percent of buyers in the Chinese market are of Chinese descent, with Chinese buyers worldwide numbering somewhere between 5 percent and 15 percent. "That's growing fast though," she says. "There's been a huge increase in the last two years."

Buying publicly at auctions seems to appeal to Chinese and Russian buyers, she says, who are often buying with new money they are eager to flaunt.

"Russian buyers like being seen spending money," she says. "The mentality is that it's a competition, and a lot of people see Chinese buyers as having the same mentality, with the long tradition of gambling in China. There's prestige in being seen spending a lot of money in public."

In some cases, this has led to some buyers disappearing after buying at auctions, Long says. She points to the example of "the $70 million vase", a Chinese vase made in the Qianlong period (1711-1799) that was sold for the extraordinary sum at a London auction in 2010 but never actually purchased.