By Jeet Thayil With a hectic week of lectures, previews, receptions and auctions, Asia Week Fall 2000, reconfirmed New York's place as the capital of the world's Asian art market. Dealers, buyers and art experts arrived in New York from all over the world, and the United States, to absorb a week of art from all over Asia. Since its inception in 1966, Asia Week has become something of a New York tradition. The week of intense art activity, with a special focus on Indian and Southeast Asian art, drew a strong response from year one. Now, in its fifth year, Asia Week is a biannual event, in spring and in fall.
Asian art represents half the world and all of time.
By linking the contemporary artist to his tradition we try to open a window for the contemporary art collector into the past. Unlike previous years when Christie's broke up South Asian art into two sections, offering contemporary Indian art separately, this year it was all offered at one sale. There is a constant broadening of the field. He said in the sixth year of the Asia Week sales it was clear that Indian art was as much in the limelight as Chinese or Japanese art. She told India in New York that after five such sales in the U.K. it was gratifying to see how many non-Indian buyers were interested in contemporary Indian art.