“The market is very slow”, says Pearl Lam. The Hong Kong gallerist, a dominant figure in the region for decades, has been panegyrised as “a powerhouse of China’s art world”. From her salad days staging pop-ups to a pre-pandemic peak of presiding over a spread of eponymous galleries across Hong Kong, Shanghai and Singapore, she is intimately familiar with the art market’s fickle dips and dives. “But this time,” she warns, “I think it’s bad.”…
