Yellow River, the Mother River (COURTESY OF WANG XIJING)

Art is widely regarded as one of the most significant assets, and over the last decade, China's art market has experienced tremendous growth. Last year, the country accounted for 24 percent of worldwide art trade.

To Wang Xijing, President of the Shaanxi Artists Association, constructing a credibility-rating system for China's art market is vital for its sustainable growth.

Credibility crisis

China's art market has undergone rapid development since the country's reform and opening up started in the late 1970s, as art collecting and ownership have come back into prominence. According to the Art Market Monitor of Artron, an influential market-tracking firm based in Beijing, the total trade volume of China's art market in 2013 was worth 64.32 billion yuan ($10.21 billion), increasing 16.46 percent over 2012.

This rapid-fire growth, however, has given rise to a number of problems, such as fake reproductions and unreasonably high prices. In Wang's view, the absence of an accreditation system has fueled these problems and will impede the further development of China's art market. "Credibility problems have existed during the entirety of the Chinese market's development," he said.

Enhancing credibility and accountability in this area requires the concerted efforts of the government, artists and art dealers. According to Wang, China's art market has largely been developing without the government's involvement, and lacks proper regulation as a result.

As a member of the National Committee of the Chinese People's Political Consultative Conference, the country's top political advisory body, Wang has put forward a proposal for establishing a credibility-rating system for the country's art exchange. He believes that such a process is a vital step in breaking through the bottleneck holding back its growth.

"The credibility system will play a powerful role in strengthening China's art market, and cements the foundation for its orderly development," Wang said. In his opinion, the system should feature a national database that registers information about artists, dealers and artwork prices.

According to a report on China's art market in 2013, released earlier this year by the China Art Financial Institute at Renmin University in Beijing, information asymmetry is a serious problem in today's domestic art market. Art producers and collection buyers have access to the most information regarding artworks and their origins, while intermediary agencies are largely left in the dark. This situation is detrimental to the healthy development of a credible market, where knock-offs of masterpieces and inflated price tags still slip through the cracks. A database could address this problem by facilitating information transparency and accessibility.

"With further development of the market, credibility-based trading within China's art market will be more and more frequent, and will definitely become the norm," Wang said.