Alessandro Digaetano Photographer

Fan Di'an, director of the National Art Museum of China (NAMOC), claims: "The government has decided to leave the issues of the art to the art, as an the economy market. So everybody can show any kind of art, the government doesn't care." Now China's gallery industry also ushered in its age of profit, and they would become the major force in the future to advance the contemporary art. The same for the Auction houses: Guardian Auction House initiated in Mainland China a special auction of oil paintings in 1994, which symbolized the beginning of a local second-order market for contemporary Chinese art. After that Poly and others also brought out their special oil painting auctions. The deal volume of Guardian's first auction was only 1.96 million RMB-yuan in 1994, whereas in 2006, the auction houses' spring auctions had approached hundreds of millions RMB-yuan. Contemporary Chinese art became the hotspot of world's attention in the last decades, even in auction area, a multi-party competing situation had formed, with Beijing and Hong Kong being centers, New York important observation window, and Taiwan, Shanghai the regional centers. And outside China as well. A few years ago Sotheby's did not even hold auctions of Chinese contemporary art. But the last spring auction in Hong Kong went very well and last year it sold nearly $200 million worth of Asian contemporary art, the bulk of it by Chinese artists. So, in September Sotheby's plans to sell more works at a New York auction. *** Local Caption *** Eleonora Battiston, Marella Gallery Director, specialized in Chinese Art History when she took Oriental Studies at Bologna University. In 2002 she proposed to the owners of Marella Gallery to collaborate with them. Marella Gallery was founded in 1994 and opened its present main space in Milan in 1998. Its activity is based on research works across Europe, America and, since 2001, also China. On March 28th 2005, Marella Gallery opened a new space in Beijing, inside the prosp