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The Collector | Auction houses to persevere with selling Western art in Hong Kong - but should they move beyond big-ticket conservatism?

Despite a disappointing price for a Warhol Mao last month, some houses are intent on bringing more works by big-name artists to their Hong Kong sales – although their selections are predictable

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If big-ticket items are not fetching the prices expected, auctioneers can always try lower-priced works such as Portrait of Lady Jane Staunton with Her Son, Afterwards Sir George Thomas Staunton, Baronet, And A Chinese Attendant Holding a Chest of Tea, a 1792 work by John Hoppner estimated to fetch between £10,000 and £15,000 at a Sotheby’s sale in London but which went unsold. Photo: Sotheby's

Published: 8:02am, 11 May 2017Updated: 5:28pm, 12 May 2017

A uction houses will continue to experiment with the sale of Western art in Hong Kong this month, when Christie’s internationalises its 20th century and contemporary art evening here for the first time.

On May 27, works by Cecily Brown, Willem de Kooning, Adrian Ghenie, Gerhard Richter, Rudolf Stingel and Cy Twombly will be offered alongside Asian names more familiar in Hong Kong auctions.

The two top lots among the Western paintings are Richter’s Abstraktes Bild 687-2 (1989) and Twombly’s Untitled (1961), each estimated to fetch somewhere between HK$32 million and HK$46 million before fees.

Rival Phillips, which will hold its Asia spring auctions the following evening, has secured works by George Condo, Peter Doig, Anselm Kiefer, Richter, Ed Ruscha, Andy Warhol and Jonas Wood. It will hold a separate auction for more than 200 photographs taken by Warhol during his trip to Hong Kong and mainland China in 1982.

Anselm Kiefer's Voyage au Bout de la Nuit (estimated to sell for HK$5.5 million to HK$7.5 million at a Phillips sale. Photo: Courtesy of Anselm Kiefer

Christie’s is calling its evening sale “groundbreaking”, a sale of “truly global proportions”, and it is indeed still unusual for the Western art departments in New York and London to convince consignors to opt for a totally different time zone.

Bonhams started selling works on paper by Western artists in 2015, and last October, South Korean pop star T.O.P. included Western art for a sale he guest curated for Sotheby’s, which went on to include Western contemporary art in its spring evening sale in March. Phillips had works by the likes of Ghenie, Roy Lichtenstein and Richter in its inaugural art and design auction in November, the same time Christie’s held its “Loaded Brush” private sale of Western art.

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