The Chinese art auction market and Artron celebrated its fifteenth anniversary this year after its founding in 1993. The last fifteen years have witnessed the Chinese art market’s growth from infancy to maturity, as both a witness to and one of the driving forces behind the development of the art sector, Artron has been providing increasingly diversified services, adjusting itself to the mainstream and the rapidly growing art market by constantly offering superior services.

Artron.net, a part of Artron (Group), is a Chinese art portal and an important platform and tool to provide comprehensive professional information for all art circles. In the eight years from its establishment in 2000 till now, Artron.net has continued to deepen the understanding of the art market, strengthening its ability to integrate and command art market information, and grow together with the Chinese art auction market. Modern network technologies have provided invaluable tools for Artron.net, enabling it to establish the Artron Chinese Art Database which is now the most integral data platform featuring the most applications in the world. It has already collected over 1.3 million auction images and documental data from over 4000 special auctions at 212 auction companies related to Chinese art in the last fifteen years with the increasing speed of 700 special auctions and 250,000 items. In addition, Artron.net is currently adding more information data relating to Chinese art auctions from 1970 onwards to make the database even more comprehensive. At the same time, more than 60,000 artists’ information is being updated every day, including over 8,000 exhibitions held by more than 1,000 galleries and more than 600 art organizations, with over 200,000 exhibition works inputted into our database. However, simple data collection and presentation is only the first step, the real value of data lies in in-depth statistics, analysis, and research. Since Artron launched the “Artron Index” in 2004, we hope that these huge volumes of data information are not only timely and effective, but also helpful for industry analysis, statistics, forecasting and even practical for finance and investment, art valuation, art insurance and more.

The Artron Data Center is the core institution for industry data statistic research. In July of this year, the Artron data center was officially updated to become the Artron Art Market Monitoring Center. We are absorbing a professional personnel in investment, stocks, risk management and insurance, and our core duty is to research and analyze the art market. We promote the development of the art market through the research and regular publication of the Artron Index, the publication of auction and gallery yearly and quarterly industry reports and through organizing regular industry symposiums.

The Artworks Auction Market of China: Spring, 2008 is the first industry analysis report issued by Artron Art Market Monitoring Center. The data statistics and analysis presented by this report aim to be extensive, in-depth and enriched, at the same time, a recapitulatory judgment and assessment of the auction industry is included in the report. However, a large number of factors outside of the auction market unavoidably affect the data in the report, and they may even mislead our conclusions, we hope to reduce this influence by complete data analysis and by reducing data deviation by presenting a comprehensive report. The report will be amended quarterly and yearly, ensuring all data is continuously up-to-date. If we were to draw an analogy between the Chinese art Market and the ocean, Artron.net aims to resemble a boat that moves and adjusts constantly to confront the waves, ensuring that Artron.net will become a more active power in the art market.