Word: borobudur
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Dates: during 2000-2009
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...probably not come to mind. There's no bespoke suit or Etonian comportment. Instead, the burly Andreas sports cheap slacks, an off-the-rack polyester shirt and the mercantile mannerisms of a hard-bitten trader. Yet the former Indonesian shipping agent happens to be the founder and CEO of Borobudur Auction; in October his four-year-old company fetched $6.89 million at a Singapore sale of contemporary and modern Southeast Asian art. The figure was just $200,000 less than the highest figure taken at similar sales by venerable auctioneers Sotheby's. "I do break even and have a profit...
...growth of an Asian art industry that is becoming too big for the traditional duopoly of Sotheby's and Christie's to control. The new firms are moving into vacated markets (when Sotheby's shifted its Singapore sale to Hong Kong in the hopes of finding wealthier buyers, Borobudur gladly picked up the slack), or they are targeting new ones. China Guardian, for one, focuses on the Chinese domestic market. Osian's does the same in India. For now, most of the new players are sticking to the art market's lower and middle tiers to avoid competing with Sotheby...
...rest of Asia. "The globalization of the art market is greater than it ever has been," Stone says. Observes Malaysian lawyer, author and collector Karim Raslan: "Christie's and Sotheby's increasingly realize their niche is cross-selling globally, between, say, Europeans and Chinese, whereas auction houses like Borobudur and Larasati are cross-selling between Filipinos and Indonesians...
...area of authentication. Some firms invest heavily in expertise - Bid & Hammer has Sotheby's former head of South Asian art on its staff, as well as a historian. But most of the new firms simply cannot match the seasoned in-house proficiency of Christie's or Sotheby's. Borobudur, for example, refuses to handle Chinese porcelains because, Andreas says, "we don't have the experts...
...first impression: "Some ships, when you first see them, you're not sure which end is the front and which is the back. When I first saw a picture of this ship, I wasn't sure which end was the top." Yet when she cuts through the water, the Borobudur possesses an undeniable majesty...