In a pandemic, this art fair week is anything but normal

Taipei Dangdai is back, but with shifts in behaviour, consumption and the industry in general – just who will meet them on the other side?

By Joanna Lee

Mak2, “Pandemic Love 4”, 2021. Image courtesy of de Sarthe and Taipei Dangdai.

The arts, broadly speaking, is still feeling the aftershocks from the last two years.

Back in 2020, I wrote about the ways in which an industry so predicated on the “live” experience was completely floored in a pandemic. Two years on, as we all try to adjust to a new pandemic “normal” and push through with regular programming, it’s hard to pretend the industry did not incur significant financial losses, brain drain and shrinking engagement on a global scale. In fact, on that last note, the organisation I currently work for, which engages young people in theatre, has been desperately trying to get their primary audience back into programmes, with great difficulty.  

The art market itself, however, has marched to a considerably different beat, seeing not only a speedy recovery, but a kind of spectacular rise. According to the 2022 Art Basel and UBS Global Art Market Report, though the art market was met with one its worst downturns the year the pandemic struck, it quickly bounced back in 2021 – even surpassing its value in 2019, just prior to Covid. Aggregate sales by dealers and auctioneers reached US$65.1 billion, climbing by 29% from 2020.

The success of the market, and particularly the high end of the market, is in part due to the rising wealth of high-net-worth individuals. As noted by the report, the pandemic has clearly contributed to greater income inequality and pushed many into poverty, but such shifts undoubtedly change spending patterns – and “the rapid advance in wealth at the top has helped to support luxury markets such as art and antiques.”

The recent explosive rise of NFTs, too, had an impact on the sector. Although the report notes that most NFT sales “have been outside the traditional art market” for now, the quick shift towards the digitised new frontier has diversified buyers and buyer behaviours – enticing “younger, tech-savvy collectors, often unknown to established galleries and fairs,” Christl Novakovic, CEO of UBS Europe SE and Head Wealth Management Europe, wrote.

It is against this backdrop that the annual Taipei Dangdai art fair, the country’s young international contemporary art fair, finds itself as it prepares for its 2022 opening – initially heralded as a big return after its postponement the previous year.

Where Taiwan was relatively sheltered from the impact of Covid in the latter half of 2021, Omicron has now swept the country, and is set to peak around the same time as the Dangdai opening. Moreover, the country has persisted with travel restrictions and quarantine measures, meaning that the flurry of the traditional art fair week, with its swirling mix of collectors, patrons, agents and artists, will be a much more subdued one in reality.

According to its wrap-up report, Dangdai’s inaugural event back in 2019 attracted over 28,000 visitors, including international collectors and representatives from leading art institutions. In 2020, that figure climbed to 40,000 – drawing prominent art-world figures like collector Richard Chang and artist Takashi Murakami, artnet reported.

If 2020 saw 99 participating galleries, the figure would have dropped by almost half at this year’s Dangdai, in part due to ongoing travel restrictions in the country. Fair co-director Robin Peckham noted in an online press conference that a handful of international galleries have “tried really hard” to be physically present at this year’s fair, with gallerists and representatives choosing to do their ten-day quarantine in order to enter the country. As for the gallerists who cannot attend, Peckham said the fair had already organised independent agents to act on behalf of them.

Moreover, with more than 65,000 daily cases at the time of writing, some artists had mentioned to me anecdotally that they were hesitant about going to the fair, despite many of them having been invited by galleries to attend.

Similarly, where the debut of Taipei Dangdai in 2019 coincided with a jam-packed list of art shows, performances and events in the city, current anxieties around the Covid peak have also reduced this in capacity — take Art Revolution Taipei’s postponement (link in Chinese), for example.


Sin Wai Kin, “If I had the words to tell you we wouldn’t be here now”, 2019.
Image courtesy of Chi-Wen Gallery.