Chinese Art and Modern Indian Painting Dominate Strong Asian Auctions

NEW YORK—The robust market for Chinese art and modern contemporary Indian painting fueled strong results at the Asian sales at Christie's and Sotheby's last week. Christie's brought in $29,872,440, it's highest-ever Asia week total, with Chinese works alone accounting for nearly half of that figure. Sotheby's sales totaled a respectable $23,066,140. The Chinese sales were dominated by Chinese buyers from the mainland as well as overseas and Indian buyers, including expatriates, who continued to push prices for Indian paintings to dizzying heights.

Consigners took advantage of the strong market for Chinese art by putting pieces up for sale and the auction houses were more than ready to oblige, but the volume was so high it seems to have exceeded even the capacity of today's strong market. At Christie's, 144 of the 500 lots on offer failed to sell, and at Sotheby's the buy-in rate was even more dramatic, with 211 out of 416 lots unsold.

The top Chinese porcelain wares sold extremely well at both houses. London dealer Eskenazi, Ltd. paid $3,936,000 — ten times the high estimate — for a blue-and-white meiping Ming vase that had belonged to Laurence Rockefeller, who had used it as a lamp in his house in upstate New York. For a cool $1,696,000, Eskenazi also won the top porcelain lot at Christie's, a blue and white Persian-inspired vase of the Zhengde period that had been estimated at a mere $100-150,000.

At Christie's, a well-known painting by 14th century artist Wang Meng that was considered to be the very essence of Chinese taste sold to an American collector for $1,696,000, a far cry from its high estimate of $900,000; the sale set a world auction record for Wang Meng's work. Asian collectors were also pushing prices far beyond their estimates. One snapped up a 15th-century iron-red decorated blue and white stem cup from the Xuande period for $374,000 (est: $10-15,000) and another paid $352,000 for a Qianlong period Imperial carved red lacquer screen (est: $50-70,000).

Several bidders competed at Sotheby's for the top furniture lot, an impressive pair of Imperial lacquer cabinets and hat chests estimated at $1-1.5 million. In the end they went to a Chinese collector for $1,136,000.

The popularity of modern Indian painting can be gauged by the fact that it accounted for all ten of the top lots at Sotheby's sale of Indian and Southeast Asian art, and nine of the top ten at Christie's. So great is the demand for these works that a world record for modern Indian painting was set at Sotheby's sale, and then eclipsed at Christie's the following day.

The record setting work at Sotheby's was an untitled abstract painting from the 1970s by Ram Kumar. It sold for $396,800, nearly quadrupling its high estimate. Nevertheless, it was trumped at Christie's sale by Mahisasura, a colorful 1997 painting by Tyeb Mehta, which sold for $1,584,000 (est: $600-800,000) to an Indian collector living in North America. Ram Kumar was one of twelve artists to achieve auction records at Sotheby's sale, and at Christie's other record setters were Maqbook Fida Husain, Akhar Padamsee and Atul Dodiya.

The two highlights of Christie's Japanese and Korean art sale brought strong prices. The sale's top lot was a 17th century folding album by Chong Son, Eight Views of the Liao and Xiang Rivers; it went to an anonymous buyer for $598,400, soaring past its high estimate of $350,000. And a first edition of an erotic book by Kitagawa Utamaro, Utamakura (Poem of the Pillow), sold to a European collector for $441,600 (est: $100-150,000). High prices were also achieved for a group of Japanese cloisonné enamel, and a screen referred to as Scholar's Accoutrements by an anonymous 19th-century artist sold for $352,000 against a high estimate of $220,000.

September's Asian sales generally pale in comparison to the London sales in November and the New York sales in March, full-fledged Asia Weeks when the auction houses have strong competition from antiques fairs and gallery exhibitions. Given the strong results detailed above, it will be interesting to see what happens at the next few rounds of Asian auctions.