Investment Study on Christie’ Chinese 20th Century Art

This thesis focuses on the blooming market of Chinese 20th Century Art. The study object is one category of Christie’s Auction house, Chinese 20th Century Art, before 2009. Eight artists’ auction results are selected to the dataset for the research. We find that the previous researches based on the collection of Western arts cannot explain the whole situation of Chinese 20th Century Art. It has speculative character as an invest option in global art market. And some factors would affect the price changing in the auction activities. The Capital Asset Pricing Model is applied to study the investment condition of Chinese 20th Century Art as a capital asset. The result we get from our dataset presents that Chinese 20th Century Art is with high risks and high returns, which is quite different from the previous studies based on Western Artworks. Regression analysis reveals that some factors do affect the rate of price changes. We find that young Chinese artists who born after 1950 achieve better sale results than older ones. Their artworks are always sold on high realized prices. In addition, the high price sale more often happened in the auction house of Hong Kong and the market of Chinese 20th Century Art is enlarging these years. The rate of price change is increasing by the sale year growing. The prices of the artworks are growing higher and higher recently. However, the findings above just explain parts of the price increasing. All the reasons for the price increasing are not clear in this thesis.