Hello All,
Please hang in with me during what may seem a lot of calculations in this posting.
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A few weeks ago Joey wrote :
“.... in the preface of Wang Xisan's CIPMA (Chinese Inside Painting of the Modern Age) published in early 2006 it is written that '
There are more than 40,000 persons engaging in inside painting art... annual output value ... near RMB 1 Billion' "
At first when I read that quote from CIPMA I thought Joey must be mistaken, but then I checked CIPMA and Joey is indeed correct. That's exactly what it says in the preface to CIPMA
However, although it's hardly my place to disagree with whoever wrote that originally (it's signed by the Editorial Board of CIPMA) find it completely at variance with fact
unless the numbers include factory workers and the general tourist / Christmas trinket / junk IPB business .
If you read the first part of my ICSBS article, which you can access in the sidebar, you will see that when I analyzed my DB I found about 950 artists, of which about 670 were real names and about 280 were alternate art names (thus total about 670 real artists, some of whom also use alternate art names when they signed bottles). This covers the whole 60 year period of MIPBs
Although my DB is far from exhaustive (particularly regarding very minor artists from the period 1985 - 2000 when I was not collecting and there were a lot of new-but-very-short-lived artists) it's now very rare that I come across a name that I cannot eventually find in my DB when the exact Pin Yin is clarified
And when I do occasionally come across a new artist it's almost invariably a very minor one - e.g. a student who painted a few bottles and then quickly dropped out. (If you check Bill Patrick's website
www.snuffbottlecollector.com you will find a lot of junior artists there who painted while Bill was doing the bulk of his collecting and visiting Hengshui in the early 2000s, but who have now completely vanished).
So I reckon that at maximum there were / are at very most only 2,000 (maybe only 1,500 ?)
real MIPB artists who ever painted including all the students who dropped out after painting a few bottles which they bothered to sign (or have had signed by their Master , e.g. Da Yong signed hundreds - if not thousands - of his students bottles either with his name or with another art name (e.g. the Liu Jianghua scam - over 2,500 bottles signed "Liu Jianghua" which were in fact painted by students of Da Yong in Hengshui - see separate thread)
More to the point, at any one time there were/are only 200 - 300 artists
of any significance actively painting, of which only 100 (maximum 150) were/are serious "big names" whose work was/is worth collecting.
Whenever I have been to exhibitions of VMIPBs in China I have seen only 50 - 70 artists exhibiting, and usually it was the same "core" group of top 30 + artists.
So I am convinced that the "40,000" artists and the "RMB 1 billion" annual output includes the tourist and trinket trade factory workers (although I have yet to see any such factory myself)
Actually a simple back-of-the envelope calculation confirms this.
Assuming about 40,000 factory workers who each paint two bottles per day and dividing that into RMB1 Billion gives an average price of RMB30 (= about US$5) per bottle. I reckon that RMB30 /US$5 is meant in CIPMA to be the sale price by the time the bottle reaches retailers so assuming a 3:1 mark-up between the factory and the retail price to cover the profits of the intermediate traders, the ex-factory price is about RMB 10 per bottle. 2 x bottles per day per worker = 60 bottles per month = RMB 600 per month per worker (not including factory overheads ), which was indeed the average factory worker wage in the mid 2000s.
..... I think you can see how the numbers work out very roughly.
At the time CIPMA was published in 2006 the 116 artists listed were probably
on average selling their bottles to collectors and/or dealers at about RMB1,000 - 2,000 each and were painting at the rate of about 10 - 20 bottles per year. Assuming upper figures : 20 bottles x RMB2,000 p.a. = RMB40,000 p.a. = about RMB 3,500 p.m., which is roughly what I estimated the average middle-ranking artist was earning in the mid-late 2000s : RMB 3,500 - 4,500 p.m. based on their apartments and standard of living. (The very few top masters were of course earning much more, but not significantly more : perhaps RMB 10 -12K p.m. ?)
Assume 100 - 150 x active
real artists @ RMB40,000 p.a. annual selling price output per artist in 2006 : that = about RMB5 million p.a. which is only
0.5% of the "RMB 1 Billion" total industry quoted in CIPMA. So there is no way that the work of the real artists can add up to "RMB 1 Billion"
To repeat:these are back-of-the-envelope calculations but you can see how the numbers make general sense.
Another indirect cross-confirmation is the fact that when I was collecting in the period 2006 - 2010 and was still buying many of my bottles from specialist VMIPB shops (as opposed to buying direct from artists or specialist dealers like Jill and Li Hui) I found only a couple of specialist shops : one in Beijing and one in Shanghai. On the other hand there were at least 2 -3 dozen other shops selling tourist trade bottles in amongst all the usual tourist trade stone carvings, paintings etc in each of those cities, not to mention all the hotel lobby gift shops. (And that's only BJ and SH : what about Nanjing, Guangzhou, and all the other major tourist cities ?)
Let's take BJ as an example and say that there were in total about 1,000 tourist shops and hotel gift shops each selling about 10 bottles per year = 10,000 per year
At those two specialist shops I mentioned in BJ and SH, they each had over 500 + good quality "tourist" bottles for sale, but only about maximum 10 x bottles at any one time by
real artists (i.e. the kind of artists whose names appeared in CIPMA) and they only sold at most 5 x bottles by
real artists per year. I know that because I often saw the same bottles for sale for many months (and in one supreme case : my Song Yiming goldfish bottle was on sale for 2 years because its list price was RMB15,000, until I finally bought it)
So again, taking BJ as an example : the ratio of bottles by real artists to total tourist-trade bottles was very roughly 5:10,000 =
0.5% . Same ball-park.
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So after that very long screed I have two questions :
1. Does anyone else have some anecdotal information to corroborate (or otherwise) my rough calculations?
2. Has anyone ever visited a VMIPB factory in China ?
(I haven't, but I would be very interested to visit one)
Cheers
Peter
PS: Corrections also welcomed to my ball-park calculations