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Christie's to Open New Hong Kong HQ, Sees Growing Asian Gen Z Interest

People watch the sunset over Victoria Harbour from a mountaintop in Hong Kong, China March 12, 2024. REUTERS/Tyrone Siu/File Photo
People watch the sunset over Victoria Harbour from a mountaintop in Hong Kong, China March 12, 2024. REUTERS/Tyrone Siu/File Photo
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Christie's to Open New Hong Kong HQ, Sees Growing Asian Gen Z Interest

People watch the sunset over Victoria Harbour from a mountaintop in Hong Kong, China March 12, 2024. REUTERS/Tyrone Siu/File Photo
People watch the sunset over Victoria Harbour from a mountaintop in Hong Kong, China March 12, 2024. REUTERS/Tyrone Siu/File Photo

Auction house Christie's hopes its new 50,000-sq-ft Asia headquarters that opens in Hong Kong in September will boost sales in 2024 amid increased interest across the region from a new generation of culturally astute millennials and younger.
Francis Belin, Christie's Asia-Pacific president, said he is "cautiously optimistic" about sales in the region as they try to engage with clients with the right products, right price and "exciting" events, Reuters said.
"We think we'll continue to see a market in 2024 which is not as booming as in 2021, but it's one that we can navigate if we do the right thing like we did in 2023," Belin told Reuters on Monday.
Total auction sales in the Asia-Pacific region eased 4% to $805 million last year from 2022, contributing 28% to the group's total. The sales decline compared to 43% and 9% drops in Americas and EMEA (Europe, Middle East, Africa), respectively.
Greater China accounted for 80% of Asia-Pacific sales.
Christie's also saw a surge in new buyers among millennials, born between 1981 to 1996, and Gen Z, born since 1997. It said Asia-Pacific accounted for 66% of its global millennial buyers last year, and more than half of them were from mainland China. Gen Z buyers from Asia-Pacific also more than doubled.
Belin said the auction house had started to see a surge in buying from young Chinese collectors for Chinese works of art and paintings over the past three years, rising from a few percentage points to up to 20% now, thanks to the company's increasingly use of Chinese social media apps such as Wechat and Xiaohongshu.
"So you find collectors at the depth of collecting, not just the hip, new artist, but that goes back to their cultural roots. That's meaningful for them and their culture," Belin said.
The market was slower last year because collectors were not convinced it was the best time to sell, he added.
The auction house will open its new Asia-Pacific headquarters at The Henderson, a new office tower in Hong Kong's prime Central district, in September. Christie's four floors in the building, which is being designed by Zaha Hadid Architects and developed by Henderson Land, will launch a three-month program of sales, exhibitions and events until November.
Belin shrugged off the impact of new national security laws that the Hong Kong government has imposed on the city, saying the financial hub still has a free flow of capital and rule of law.
He said he recognised the Hong Kong government's efforts in developing the city's arts and culture by hosting international events and building the West Kowloon Cultural District, which overlooks Victoria Harbour.
"Hong Kong will be able to rebuild itself; art and culture is part of it."
The Knight Frank Luxury Investment Index (KFLII), which tracks the performance of 10 popular investments of passion, showed that art was the best-performing luxury asset class in 2023, followed by jewelry, with prices rising 11% and 8%, respectively.
Knight Frank said in a report last week clients in Hong Kong allocate 19% of their investment portfolio to luxury investments, in line with the global average.

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Dead Sea an 'Ecological Disaster', but No One Can Agree How to Fix It

The Dead Sea has been dying for years - AFP
The Dead Sea has been dying for years - AFP
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Dead Sea an 'Ecological Disaster', but No One Can Agree How to Fix It

The Dead Sea has been dying for years - AFP
The Dead Sea has been dying for years - AFP

An abandoned lifeguard cabin, a rusty pier and mangled umbrellas are all that is left of Ein Gedi, once a spot drawing international tourists to float in the world-famous waters of the Dead Sea.

Now, this lush desert oasis at the lowest point on Earth sits in ruins beside the shrinking sea, whose highly salty waters are rapidly retreating due to industrial use and climate change, which is accelerating their natural evaporation.

The beach has been closed to the public for five years, mainly due to the appearance of dangerous sinkholes, but also because the dramatic recession of the sea's level has made it tricky to reach its therapeutic waters, known for extraordinary buoyancy that lets bathers float effortlessly.
The increasingly exposed shoreline and the sinkholes, caused by a flow of freshwater dissolving layers of salt beneath the Earth's surface, are not new.
In fact, the Dead Sea, nestled where Jordanian and Palestinian territory meet, has famously been dying for years.

Now, with war raging in the Middle East, efforts to tackle this ever-worsening ecological disaster appear to have dissolved too.

"Regional cooperation is the key... to saving the Dead Sea," said Nadav Tal, a hydrologist and water officer for the Israel office of EcoPeace, a regional environmental nonprofit that has long advocated for finding a solution.

"Because we are living in a conflict area, there is an obstacle," he said, describing how the sea has been declining more than one metre (three feet) per year since the 1960s.

- 'Ecological disaster' -

The evaporation of the salty waters in a time of rapid climate change and in a place where summer temperatures can reach upward of 50 degrees Celsius (122 degrees Fahrenheit) has been exacerbated by decades of water diversions from the sea's main source -- the Jordan River -- as well as various tributaries that begin in Lebanon and Syria.

The water is also being pumped out by local factories extracting natural minerals -- potash, bromine, sodium chloride, magnesia, magnesium chloride and metal magnesium -- to sell to markets across the world.

"The consequences of this water diversion is what we see around us," Tal told AFP, pointing to a nearby pier that was once submerged in water but now stands firmly on dry land.

"It is an ecological disaster," he emphasized.

Although some efforts have been made to address the Dead Sea disaster, including past agreements signed by Israel and Jordan, the wars raging in Gaza and beyond have brought regional tensions to an all-time high, meaning tackling cross-border environmental issues is no longer a priority for governments in the region.