Antiques in fashion

Over the past three decades, Chinese contemporary art has writhed out of the wilderness of "cultural revolution" (1966-1976) purges and other upheavals, later piggy-backing on China's economic and political rise, to catch the eye of the global art community.

While plunging prices of avant-garde art worldwide represents big potential upside, major art investors such as Philip Hoffman of the Fine Art Fund in London are putting their money more in conservative, safer bets, with recent Asian sales in New York and Hong Kong showing strong demand and prices for traditional categories of Chinese art, including classic ink-brush paintings, imperial scholars' objects, and Ming (1368-1644) and Qing (1644-1911) dynasties ceramics.

"We've allocated more to porcelain and ancient art, but we've allocated very little to Chinese contemporary," Hoffman says.

"I've been amazed to see how the recession has not been affecting the very best (traditional) Chinese art."

Echoing this view, Andy Hei, the head of the Hong Kong International Art and Antiques Fair, says: "Antiques turn out to be fashionable again."

"We're seeing more old, solid money coming back again to buy ... instead of the new, soft money of the past 10 years."

Maturing market

At its peak, the Chinese contemporary art market was seen by some to be highly manipulated and speculative.

Auction houses were accused of collusion with artists to inflate prices, critics and curators blamed for hyping-up artists reputations for hard cash, and artists churned out works straight for auction, production-style with an army of assistants, rather than going through the traditional primary market of art galleries first.

"In a Chinese context, the phenomenon of auctions in the art market is a very new thing," says Ingrid Dudek, a contemporary Chinese art specialist with Christie's.

"A lot of the results were driven by private collectors, indicating not necessarily speculation, but enormous demand ... maybe that did make the correction hurt a little bit more too because you didn't have a dealer network that was there."

Now though, galleries and dealers seem to be making a comeback, with artists seeing the worth of being patiently backed and promoted to ensure reputations and valuations are less vulnerable to market volatilities.

"Some other galleries think going to auction is a test of the market value (of an artist) so they can make faster money. But we try to do the opposite," says Federico Keller of Hong Kong's Connoisseur Contemporary gallery specializing in Asian and younger Chinese artists, many born in the 1980s.

"We just basically blind ourselves, without looking at the outside market," says Sappho Ma, who also runs the Connoisseur group of galleries. "For us things are about the long term, we try not to be too short-sighted. It's too easy to speculate on artwork (but) this isn't challenging enough."