I met Wan Jie several months after our first exchanges. I already knew his work. I knew Artron. I knew his role in China’s documentary renaissance. But nothing truly prepared me for meeting the man. From the first moments, I understood that I did not have before me a business leader in the Western sense of the term.

I had before me a researcher.

An engineer.

A humanist.

Very quickly, the conversation left the terrain of business. We talked about China. At length. I told him about my first trips. The China I had known decades earlier. The bicycles. The dirt roads. The countryside. The villages. The long conversations with those who had lived through the final years of Mao and then the opening initiated by Deng Xiaoping.

I also told him about the deep interest that had never left me.

The Silk Roads.

Chinese strategic thought.

The great movements of populations.

Geopolitical balances.

The long sweep of history.

I then saw something very subtle appear on his face. A kind of surprise.

He listened to me for a long time. Then he simply asked:

— How do you know China so well?

I told him that one can love a civilization only on one condition: first accepting the need to study it with humility. I had never come to China to explain China to the Chinese. I had come to learn. And I was still learning.

I believe that answer was the true beginning of our relationship. From that moment on, we were no longer merely speaking two different languages. We began to share a way of looking at time.

Very quickly, Wan Jie also understood that my knowledge of China did not come only from books. I knew its customs. Its rites. Its codes. Its silences.

I knew how deeply history remained present in contemporary gestures. I knew the different traditions. The great fractures. The continuities.

In my exchanges with Wan Jie and other Chinese interlocutors, I often encountered a way of placing the present within a very long historical time, sometimes on the scale of several generations.

That historical depth had permeated me for a long time. And I believe it reassured him. He understood that I had not come in search of a market. I had come to encounter a civilization.

Yet when Wan Jie later came to Lyon, I had one question.

How would he receive the Abode of Chaos?

I knew the work could be disorienting. Even in Europe. So what would a major Chinese intellectual think of it?

I quickly discovered that my concern was unnecessary. He looked differently. He did not see only the sculptures. He read the symbols. He immediately noticed the Chinese references scattered throughout the Abode of Chaos.

Passages from The Art of War.

Calligraphy.

Portraits.

Historical references.

Then he stopped before the nine portraits of Xi Jinping.

I told him that, in my own reading of the Chinese imperial imagination, the number nine and the repetition of the portrait carried a particular symbolic power. I was not trying to reproduce a historical iconographic rule, but to offer an artistic interpretation of it: several almost identical images whose repetition forces the viewer to look precisely at the differences.

A gaze.

A smile.

A gravity.

An infinitesimal variation.

I saw him smile. He had immediately understood the play of references I was proposing. No further comment was necessary.

We were already in a silent dialogue between two cultures.

As our exchanges became more regular, Wan Jie finally raised the real subject.

It was not a contract.

Nor an acquisition.

Nor even a partnership.

It was a question. Just one.

Had China become the world’s leading Art Market power?

I immediately understood that this question went far beyond Artprice. For several years, the Chinese market had been growing spectacularly. Hundreds of Auction Houses had appeared. Thousands of collectors were returning to their own heritage. Museums were opening their doors. The Art Market seemed to be changing scale.

In my exchanges with Wan Jie, I understood that the issue was not to proclaim a ranking but to have it established by a method and by figures. That was how I understood the request being made of us: apply to China exactly the same criteria as to the other countries, without indulgence.

I immediately felt the weight of that responsibility.

It was no longer merely a ranking. It was a historical fact.

Very quickly, Wan Jie made me understand that the request was not intended to flatter the West. On the contrary, it reflected a deeply Chinese conception of legitimacy. In the way he presented things, legitimacy had to come from facts and method, not proclamation.

I recognized there a very old wisdom: allowing time to confirm what one already senses.

So we accepted the mission. On one condition. The methodology would be exactly the same as for every other country.

No exceptions.

No favors.

No adjustments designed to produce an expected result.

The same criteria.

The same controls.

The same standard.

The rule was accepted immediately. Precisely because it guaranteed the credibility of the whole.

I then discovered another China. The China of engineers. Statisticians. Econometricians. Executives of major Auction Houses. Administrations.

They all worked with a precision that sometimes reminded me of major scientific laboratories. Exchanges were constant. So were verifications. Every data point underwent successive checks.

Very quickly, I understood that Wan Jie had built an impressive organization around Artron. I found in him the same obsession I had seen in Enrique Mayer, Peter Hastings Falk, and Thomas Bayer. The data had to be accurate before it was published.

The audit lasted a long time.

Much longer than those who see only the final result today might imagine.

We cross-checked.

We verified.

We recalculated.

We compared.

The Chinese figures gradually entered our global architecture. And little by little, one fact emerged.

In 2010, China did indeed become the world’s leading power in Fine Art auctions, ahead of the United States and the United Kingdom. That shift was confirmed in the years that followed.

We published it. Without particular enthusiasm. Without triumphalism. Simply because the data demonstrated it.

I knew, however, that the publication would have considerable consequences.

It did. Around the world.

Major institutions. Economists. Historians. Collectors. Auction Houses.

All understood that a historical shift had just occurred. The geography of the Art Market had changed.

I will never forget Peter Hastings Falk’s reaction.

A few days after publication, he called me. He had just been questioned by American officials seeking to understand how we had reached that result.

With his usual humor, he told me:

— It looks like you just sank the Fifth Fleet in the Pacific.

I smiled. I immediately understood what he meant.

Yet we had done nothing more than our job. We had not declared a winner. We had simply described a state of the world.

A few years later, the Covid pandemic profoundly disrupted the Chinese economy. The Art Market reorganized. Our calculations then showed China returning to second place.

Once again, we published exactly the same finding. With the same method. The same neutrality. The same standards. It was precisely that continuity that gave our work its credibility.

We were neither advocates for China.

Nor for America.

We were witnesses to a documentary reality.

Looking back, I can now see what Wan Jie had truly been seeking when he came to us. He was not seeking Western approval. He was seeking a universal method. A method strong enough to be accepted in Beijing as well as in New York, London, or Paris.

I then understood that our alliance went far beyond the Art Market. It demonstrated that the same documentary truth could be recognized by two very different civilizations. And I believe that is precisely what gave our relationship its depth.

We did not share the same history.

We shared the same demand for truth.

When I think of Wan Jie today, I no longer see only the president of Artron. I see a man who understood before many others that the true power of a civilization does not lie only in its economy. It lies in its capacity to preserve, understand, and transmit its memory.

Perhaps that is why we understood one another so well.

Each on our own continent, we were pursuing exactly the same work. And it was this silent recognition that made our alliance much more than a partnership. It became a community of destiny in the service of the global memory of the Art Market.