Shopping the International Markets as a Designer

The most enjoyable part of my job is traveling the world looking for unusual one of a kind pieces of art, architectural fragments, furniture, and other curiosities that I turn into something else.

I have done this for many years, and find the hunt, negotiation, and transport of these items to be not only challenging, but alot of fun. The most interesting story was when I was lead to a find of very old Chinese artefacts in the city of Hunan. My liasion had only heard of this area of China and had never been there himself. We rented a car and driver, and made the two hour drive to the countryside with no real expectations. We found a series of small shacks that were very old and built in a circle. In the center, a dirt assembly, parking lot, workshop emerged. It was really common ground where different collectors worked communally on the pieces in their own shacks. Each shack was full to the roof timbers with furniture, pieces of buildings, doors, ceramics, glass, and a flurry of people working. The story was that this was where pieces were brought from the country and restored or repaired for sale to some of the nicer shops in Guangzhou. To me, it was absolute paradise.

My stores were always ready for new great pieces, and this was an amazing find. I never minded seeing older pieces before they were restored or repaired, so that the work could be coordinated and directed to the taste of my loyal customers back in the midwest. My liasion and I spent a whole day (until darkness and insufficient lighting made us stop) sorting through each shack and negotiating for the items that I needed to send back to my little operation in Michigan. Each piece not only needed to be purchased, but decisions had to be made how I would use it, whether it needed to be put on a post and base for display, like sculpture, or hung on a wall as decoration, or simply sat on a floor or shelf. This was a big deal with the pieces that we found, as some of them were very large, very heavy, or extremely broken.

The first important decision that had to be made was who would be doing the restoration. Not every little shack/shop had their own people and since we did not know their talents, instead with limited time we focused on communicating to the seller of the item that we would handle the repair or restoration ourselves, and we took extensive notes about what we would do to each piece. I always carried a bound book for each trip where I kept detailed notes about each piece that I bought, the age, origination, and condition, so this was not a big deal to add to the information. Each page was a separate vendor with a business card stapled to the corner and the translation of the card in English below.

That was a fateful shipment from Southern China. The pieces were some of the most exquisite that I found in all of my travels there. And they were the oldest. Which became a very big problem. The Chinese Government does not allow any true antiques to leave the country without permission from their Department of Antiquities. All pieces imported needed a red seal (looked like a wax stamp but was actually red liquid plastic stamped) to be able to be loaded in a container. These were way beyond that. It was explained to me as they lanquished in Southern China while the Government decided what could leave and what must stay, that these pieces were significant and that would add alot more time to the process.

One year later the pieces made it through the channels and were loaded into a container. The fact that most of them were building fragments, old signs, and sculpture made the process much more difficult. We ended up receiving about 2/3 of what we paid for that day. I was thrilled.
When the container arrived and finally made it to the stores, we had people waiting for select pieces. It was a huge feeding frenzy, and most were sold within 48 hours of reaching the store.

I was fortunate enough to keep one piece from that load. She is a Female Chinese Goddess, almost life size that sits in my entry foyer today. She is over 200 years old, and was never restored, because of her age and value. She has weathered some huge storms with me, and will never be sold because of this. We are kind of in this together at this point. Like my youngest daughter, also a survivor of Chinese rule, we are joined at the hip, forever.