“The absolute leader is Canadian Matthew Wong” – Kommersant FM

Kommersant FM columnist Dmitry Butkevich talks about the results at auctions of works by artists born after 1980.

A separate subsection of the contemporary art segment is the so-called “ultracontemporary artists”. They are also called “red chips”, red chips, by analogy with the market leaders on which it is customary to bet and which are called “blue chips”.

So, “ultra-contemporary” in the terminology of the art market means artists born after 1980. Let’s accept this term and see what happens in this subsection. 27 people born after 1980 each received an auction turnover of over $1 million in the first half of 2023.

The absolute leader is Chinese-Canadian Matthew Wong. He was born in Edmonton in 1984. When he was seven, the family returned to Hong Kong. When the young man turned 15, she came to Canada again, in particular, to treat Matthew for autism.

He suffered from Tourette’s syndrome, simply put, it’s tics. At the age of 35, he committed suicide, just a year after his first exhibition. So far, Wong’s fate is similar to that of Jean-Michel Basquiat, who also left very early, and his paintings are still rising in price.

Seven works by Wong were sold in six months for a total of $14.115 million. The most expensive painting, “River at Dusk” (Wong painted landscapes with very rich colors in the primitivist style) cost $6.6 million at Sotheby’s Hong Kong.

The second was another Canadian living in New York, Dmitry Chernyak, born in 1988. He’s a digital investor who got into NFT art with great success. Over the course of six months, seven auction lots by Chernyak, whom fans call GaryVee, received $7.111 million. The most expensive of them was slightly behind Wong: an NFT with the name “Calls #879 (Goose)” went for $6.215 million at Sotheby’s New York.

And the youngest millionaire artist was the South Korean author Anna Park, born in 1996. Her result is $1.36 million. The 27-year-old artist paints with watercolors. In general, it is worth noting that in the list of leaders of the “post-1980” generation there is a noticeable predominance of women.