Christie’s enters Beijing market

With an eye to cashing in on mainland China’s growing art market, the New York auction house Christie’s is partnering with a newly formed Beijing auction house called Forever to hold its first auction in Beijing.

The auction, to take place Nov. 3 at Beijing’s Great Wall Sheraton Hotel, will consist of 473 lots of modern and contemporary Chinese paintings and is expected to bring in about $10 million, a Christie’s spokeswoman confirmed Monday.

While Christie’s has held auctions in Hong Kong since the mid-1980s, Beijing is an “untapped market,” said Andree Corroon, head of communications for the auction house.

“I would say that, for the past two or three seasons, Christie’s sales in Hong Kong have been doubling,” Corroon said. “Hundreds of millions of dollars’ worth of art get sold each year in Beijing and Shanghai. As a company, we’ve been focusing on emerging markets, and this is one of the obvious ones. We recently opened in Dubai, and mainland China is the next region.”