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Copies, Collaborations, and Gifts: Artistic Production Practices and Pricing in the Chinese Art Market

par Song, Yuqing
Président du jury Pirotte, Hugues
Promoteur Oosterlinck, Kim
Co-Promoteur Radermecker, Anne-Sophie
Publication Non publié, 2026-09-04

Thèse de doctorat

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Résumé :

Art is increasingly considered an investment, yet the art market is distinct from traditional financial markets. In traditional financial markets, price is determined directly by supply and demand; in the art markets, price is the outcome of a multi‑layered institutional and structural process, with supply and demand only appearing at the very end. Whereas the economic literature tends to focus on evaluating the investment performance of art, the sociological literature emphasizes the critical role of intermediaries in constructing its value. Together, these perspectives offer important insight into price dynamics, yet they both overlook a central element: the artist.Artists are the makers of artworks and thus producers of value at its very root, but the extent to which they influence market valuation, after multiple layers of interventions, remains largely unknown. My thesis investigates how artists, through their production practices, shape the value of the artworks they create. I ask how, within a multilayered, complex market like the art market, artists can still act as economic agents.My thesis contributes to this broad literature on how physical qualities of art may influence its valuation from the perspective of the Chinese art market, one of the world’s largest and rapidly growing emerging art market. Despite the rising prominence among investors in Chinese art, the Chinese art market has been largely overlooked in the art investment literature, largely due to culture, language, and data limitations. I focus on Chinese calligraphy and painting, the most important art forms and the largest market segment in China, and examine inscriptions written by artists to gain insights on artistic production practices and illuminate the role of artists as producers of artworks and their value.I collect auction sales data from Artron.net, one of the most comprehensive databases on Chinese art. These artworks are sold worldwide, and the time frame covers between 1994 to 2022, the longest possible at the time of the studies. In each chapter, I look into one artistic practice: Chapter 1 on copying, Chapter 2 on collaborating, and Chapter 3 on gifting. Regarding data analysis, the primary method I use is hedonic regressions. Based on this, I combine other empirical methods, such as content analysis (Chapter 1 and Chapter 3) and social network analysis (Chapter 2).Artists are not only creators of artworks, but also economic actors embedded within broader social worlds. Their production practices leave traces—here examinedthrough artist inscriptions—that shape the artworks themselves and continue to influence how those works are valued once they enter the market. Each chapter examines a particular artistic production practice through the works of a prominent figure in Chinese art history and evaluates how the market receives the artworks produced through that practice. Copying, collaborating, and gifting are long-standing and widespread artistic practices that are central to how artists learn, create, and maintain social relationships. By linking current market research with art history, this thesis demonstrates that modern market reception—and ultimately the value attributed to artworks—depends not only on what artists created, but on how they created them.