Summarize this content to 2000 words in 6 paragraphs in Arabic “The market is very slow”, says Pearl Lam. The Hong Kong gallerist, a dominant figure in the region for decades, has been panegyrised as “a powerhouse of China’s art world”. From her salad days staging pop-ups to a pre-pandemic peak of presiding over a spread of eponymous galleries across Hong Kong, Shanghai and Singapore, she is intimately familiar with the art market’s fickle dips and dives. “But this time,” she warns, “I think it’s bad.” In the art world, it pays to be irrepressibly optimistic in the face of grim realities. But Lam — instantly recognisable by her stiff, aubergine-coloured bob — is in preservation mode, as she puts it. She is scaling back her art fairs this year and waiting for a “better time” to migrate to her new three-storey space in Hong Kong’s Central district, which, when it opens, will be in addition to the two she already runs in Shanghai. New Chinese collectors want to buy ‘whatever the west is buying’, says Lam. ‘If you have a George Condo, I must have a bigger one — and I must have two’Art is among the casualties of the social and political upheavals that have convulsed Hong Kong in the past decade — from the pro-democracy protests to the Covid-induced shutdowns. An intensifying chokehold of regulations has prompted many companies and family offices to leave Hong Kong altogether. The beneficiary of this fallout, at least in the realm of the art market, has been Singapore. The success of Art SG, Singapore’s flagship art fair, and the recent proliferation of private art foundations and galleries demonstrates that the city state is becoming a serious competitor.Lam is sceptical of the hype. “Singapore is always competing with Hong Kong, all right,” she says. She has been at the centre of both markets. Between 2014 and 2019, she oversaw two sleek Singapore galleries. Lam had to shutter them because the hotspots that housed them — Gillman Barracks and Dempsey Hill — preferred “food and beverage, and I didn’t have the staff”.That experience may have contributed to her cautiousness about Singapore’s long-term prospects. “Singapore, around south-east Asia, is an important hub,” she concedes. “But its infrastructure is a problem.” Lam argues that it will take more than attracting collectors from neighbouring countries such as Indonesia and Vietnam to sustain Singapore’s rise. Strong institutions, she contends, are the catalysts for “great collectors and great artists”. And raising those institutions requires financial munificence. This is a problem because Asia, in Lam’s words, sees “museums as profitmaking” ventures. “You cannot have great collectors,” she says, “without really great museums.” And great museums need sizeable state support. The Singaporean government, she explains, “is not giving enough support to the art scene. The National Gallery [of Singapore] does not have enough funding.”Lam holds up M+, Hong Kong’s colossal art institution, as a beau idéal for others. It not only “anchors a culture scene”, but with Hong Kong Museum of Art, the Palace Museum and Tai Kwun, it makes Hong Kong a “much better platform than Singapore”. The transformation of Hong Kong’s art world, which Lam both witnessed and shaped, was frustratingly glacial. She was born in Hong Kong, the daughter of property tycoon Lim Por-yen. When she first started staging temporary shows in her hometown in the early 1990s — after studying law and accountancy in the UK (and striking a deal with her father in which she promised also to work in the family business) — Lam found the territory to be a “cultural desert”. She remembers “museum patron groups” bypassing Hong Kong and going “to Beijing and Shanghai”.These early groups were the first to pick up contemporary Chinese art as though it were “a tourist souvenir”. “The Germans were first, then the French and Americans,” she says. “The British came very late.” They had no idea that what they took home would swiftly become a prized part of a buying frenzy that would help thrust on to the global stage artists who until then had been largely unknown outside the region. Lam sees the turning point as Sotheby’s first New York auction of contemporary Asian art in 2006. Initially, I could not appreciate figurative art. Something in me evolved through learning about other peoplePrices for works suddenly skyrocketed. Lam’s fortunes soared with them. The day before the sale, Lam “bought some photographs from an artist” for $500. The next day, she says, they were being auctioned for as much as $80,000. As one of the few dealers who had been supporting Chinese artists for decades, Lam’s phone was inundated with calls from potential buyers. “‘We want this. We want more this and this,’” she recounts them saying. “Every American gallery wanted to have a Chinese artist.”The high of those days — when collectors raced to acquire works by artists such as Zeng Fanzhi, New York galleries scooped up Chinese talent, and major institutions, from MoMA to Guggenheim, staged exhibitions devoted to Chinese art — seem a world away from the slog entailed in engaging international attention today. “No one shows Chinese artists any more,” Lam says plaintively. This, she suggests, is a byproduct of the deepening rift between the US and China. Tariffs currently impose a 7.5 per cent levy on any artworks made in China that enter the US. “Which gallery wants to pay a tariff for Chinese art?” Lam asks.The domestic market has also shifted. Where once Chinese political pop art was highly sought after, there is now, Lam says, a new class of young, “sophisticated” collectors who, returning home with new ideas from studies abroad, are eager to pour their parents’ money into “whatever the west is buying”. It’s a trend powered, Lam says, by ego. “If you have a George Condo, I must have a bigger one — and I must have two.”Lam too has diversified of late. She has always aspired to bridge, to borrow her gallery’s slogan, “East and West”: she takes pride in showing heroes of Chinese abstraction such as Zhu Jinshi alongside, say, acclaimed American artist Leonardo Drew. Recently, however, her roster has become more focused on artists from Africa — such as Lagos-born painter and sculptor Alimi Adewale whose work she displayed last year at 1-54 Contemporary African Art Fair, London’s sole international art fair devoted to work from the continent. The experience of working with these artists has proved to be educational. “Initially, I could not appreciate figurative art,” Lam admits. That “block” has now vanished. “Something in me evolved through learning about other people.” So eager is she to broaden her horizons that, during her last visit to Johannesburg, Lam “visited 80-something artists in four days.” Lam is clearly thrilled by this tilt — by its “boom, boom, boom”, as she calls it. She relishes her itinerant lifestyle (“Pearlthetornado” is her X handle and “Pearltheworld” is her Instagram ID). “I don’t do holidays — I can’t,” she says. “And I don’t know how to go to the spa.” Over the course of a coming week, Lam tells me, she will be in Paris, London, New York and LA. She is out every day. “And if I’m not, then I’m giving dinner parties.” (Her soirées are fabled affairs. One of her homes has a 66-seat dining table and she is known to host 10-course suppers.) The most recent result of Lam’s gregariousness is The Pearl Lam Podcast. Listen to it and you hear her cordially interrogate her guests — from storied collectors Don and Mera Rubell to two-Michelin-star chef Stéphanie Le Quellec. If her questions seem frank and frivolous in the same breath, her reactions are often disarmingly earnest. On the off chance that the market does not recover, Lam is, wittingly or not, crafting a smart exit plan. pearllam.comFind out about our latest stories first — follow FT Weekend on Instagram and X, and sign up to receive the FT Weekend newsletter every Saturday morning
