Beginning in Singapore in March, Andy Warhol will take Asia, brought to you by the biggest names in Pittsburgh.

After a year of planning, the largest bank in the Pennsylvania city, BNY Mellon, announced Tuesday that it would be sponsoring a huge two-year traveling retrospective of over 300 Warhol works in Asia, curated by one of Pittsburgh's grandest art institutions, the Andy Warhol Museum. The show will appear in Singapore, Hong Kong, Shanghai, Beijing, and Tokyo between March 2012 and 2014 and will have additional sponsorship from three non-bank brands that nonetheless scream "cha-ching": Christie's, Bloomberg, and the Economist. 

The exhibit is called "15 Minutes Eternal" after the artist's claim that "in the future, everyone will be world-famous for fifteen minutes." Warhol already enjoys popularity in Asia, at least more so than most American artists. But it's unlikely that his hometown has much notoriety in China — and this could be its 15 minutes. "This is a way to send Pittsburgh abroad," said Eric Shiner, the Warhol Museum's director. The canvases headed to Singapore are almost entirely made up of inventory from the Warhol Museum, save for two works on long-term loan to the museum that belong to private collectors from the United States.

Despite the fact that there is an auction house on board, the show is nominally educational rather than commercial. According to Amy Cappellazzo, the head of post-war and contemporary art at Christie's, the auction house was brought on as "value-added in terms of special event planning" (they are good at art-world cocktail parties). But even while promoting an educational mission, Christie's could experience a boost in Hong Kong sales if Warhol proves popular enough.

"I can't think of another [Western] artist that you could bring to Asia who would have the same kind of name recognition and spark the same kind of curiosity as Andy Warhol. We anticipate enormous crowds," said Cappellazzo. Both she and Shiner noted that Warhol visited Asia before it was cool for artists to do so. His first trip to the continent was in 1956, and in 1981 he traveled to China. 

Though Christie's denies that boosting the Western art market in Hong Kong is its primary angle, the auction house released its sales totals for 2011 Tuesday and it showed a significant slowdown in the company's growth in Asia. That's not to say that it isn't still growing (at a rate of 11 percent), but it is a far cry from the 114 percent growth in 2010. That, coupled with the exponential growth of the Beijing-based auction houses are seeing, might be enough for the auction house to invest in developing a penchant for American contemporary art in Asia. Thus far, the Hong Kong branches of Christie's and Sotheby's have stuck to promoting categories that are known to do well: Chinese traditional art, jewelry, and wine. They have stayed away from Western art because collectors in Asia haven't been interested.

Thus far, Seoul Auctions is one of the only players in Hong Kong to experiment with western art, with some success, but they haven't yielded with the eye-popping results that are seen in the contemporary categories in New York and Hong Kong. In 2010, a 1972 Warhol silkscreen of Mao Zedong fetched HK$380,000 ($49,000). A 1964 "Liz" had a low estimate of HK$370,000, but was bought in when bidding failed to reached above HK$320,000.

If this exhibition is successful, however, and Warhol becomes a sought-after brand Asia's wealthiest cities, it is unlikely that his silkscreens will be available for anywhere near $50,000. And it will be all thanks to Pittsburgh's hometown pride.