When we first got into the Chinese Yixing zisha teapot art business, we already knew that there was a lot of dishonesty, in that market.  I had bought several old-looking teapots, which I liked without knowing who the maker actually was.  Moreover, the prices were not expensive, so, it really didn't matter to me: I simply liked the styles.  Later, when we did research into teapot art, we discovered that those two teapots had names of famous artists stamped on the bottoms and lid.  We also found out that they were fakes.  With that initial experience and much advice from others, we decided that the only way to do the business, correctly, was to find the artists, themselves, for living artists, and find family members of dead artists.  In that manner, we could be assured that we and our clients would never have to worry about authenticity.

As we continued with our collection and sales of teapot art, we have met with other forms of dishonesty, in this market.  One of the big ones is overpricing, about which we have written several notes, in our blog, and about which we are preparing a longer article for Beijing Collector and Investor Magazine.  We see many dealers who charge up to five times as much and more for the same teapot art that we sell.  We get the same wholesale/dealer prices from teapot artists as they do, but we are not greedy: apparently, they are.  We have also experienced overpricing, directly from some teapot artists, especially,  since I am a foreigner, and all Chinese think that foreigners are rich and do not know what prices should actually be [see, e.g., our entry about that greneral topic in our In Country China blog ].

As an investor in art of various sorts, for several decades, I know markets, and I know prices.  I also do not want to overpay for any investment, art or otherwise, and I do not like to deal with dishonest people, in any business.  I also do not want to participate in or contribute to price bubbles, in any market.  Therefore, the second rule that we have applied to our Leona Craig Art business is to not deal with dishonest people or people who overprice art.

We saw a few teapots by Zhu Qiu (朱球) that we liked, several years back.  We contacted him; actually, it is his wife who controls the sales, and we have been dealing with her.  For our first two orders, she sent the wrong teapots.  Since we liked them, we decided to keep them, anyway.  We, then, retried ordering one of the ones that we were originally trying to order, and she said that it was too delicate to send by shipper, and she would bring one to a show, in Guangzhou, several months later.  We eventually went to the show and were told that Zhu Qiu was reworking that teapot because the handle had a tendency to break...even a year later, we never got it. 

Another point that I might mention is that when we do decide to deal with a new teapot artist, we choose the teapots we like and ask for all the dealer prices, and we write them all down in our pricing list.  Usually, initially, we write them next to the teapot in the artists' catalogue.  Over the last several months, we have gotten inquiries about several of Zhu Qiu's teapots, and after an inquiry, we call the artist to check availability and current price (just in case prices might have been raised).  It seems that every time we call Zhu Qiu's wife, she tries to up the price by several fold over the last time.  In the past few calls, we pointed that out to her, and she backed off to the original price she had given us.  Moreover, we should point out that not all of the teapots on their price list and website are made by Zhu Qiu; some are actually made by his wife, who makes simpler, less artistic teapots and who has much less of a reputation as a teapot artist. 

In our last call for an inquiry about their teapots, we were asking about a simple teapot that she, not he, makes.  We could not find our price list for them [we moved the gallery, in the last few months, and organization is still a problem, sometimes].  However, we did recall that the dealer price was several hundred Yuan, but when we asked her, she told us the price to us was 3,000 Yuan, many times more than the original quote and certainly too high a price for an artist with no recognition.  In fact, she said that she charges Y10,000 for that teapot on her website [I do not know if people are really stupid enough to pay that sort price for a simple teapot by an unknown or if it is just more dishonesty on her part].

As a result of all of these troubles, but especially the last one, we will no longer deal with Zhu Qiu or his wife.  They have their own website for their teapots, so, if you would like to be lied to, cheated and charged too high a price, directly by them, be my guest, but beware.  I will also tell you that they do not put prices on their website, so, who knows how much they will charge you?

We still do have the two teapots by Zhu Qiu that we got at the beginning because they kept sending us the wrong teapots, and we will sell them at the prices shown on our website, but, after that, no more.