Commodifying art, Chinese style: The making of China’s visual art market

The economic value of art to cities and regions has recently been vigorously pursued and actively studied. The rapid ascendance of China as a superpower in the global art market and associated transformation of China’s art space, however, are yet poorly understood. This paper develops a Polanyian framework to interpret the spatial and institutional evolution of China’s art market, seeing the (de)commodification of art as a cumulative process embedded in geo-historical interplays of triple logics—cultural, capital, and political, unfolding within, and reshaping in turn, historically inherited spatial structures.