Auction Update: Barely Covered
News / New York and Hong Kong
By Don J. Cohn

This year’s late-September contemporary auctions in New York saw several new price records, but that should surprise no one. The euro broke through the USD 1.40 ceiling for the first time on September 20—the very day Sotheby’s and Christie’s held their major sales of Contemporary Art Asia and South Asian Modern and Contemporary Art, respectively—enabling currency-smart investors who paid millions for Chinese paintings to get them at a discount, vis-à-vis the last round of sales in March.

Two smaller Sotheby’s sales, Indian Art on September 19 and Contemporary Art South Asia on September 21, produced fewer records, while the latter ran into trouble with its cover girl. Mrinalini Mukherjee’s Apsara (1985-86), a larger than life knotted rope sculpture of a female deity estimated at $60,000-80,000, failed to find a suitor for the weekend.

That snub was outdone by cover lot contretemps at both auction houses on September 20. Bhupen Khakhar’s painting I, Me, My Village (1978) was withdrawn from Christie’s at the last minute due to doubts about its authenticity. Suspicions first arose when the work was previewed in India and friends of the late artist remarked that the work’s various elements lacked Khakar’s customary coherence.

And at Sotheby’s, Yue Minjun’s cross-dressed cover guy, Infanta (The Princess) (1997), a riff on Velazquez’ Las Meninas featuring Yue’s signature smiling self-portrait decked out in a 17th-century crinoline skirt, caused a deafening silence in the room when it failed to meet the $1.8-2.5 million estimate. It was a far cry from Yue’s The Pope, which sold for GBP 2.14 million (over $4 million), in a London Sotheby’s sale in June. But it didn’t end there. Just before the break for lunch that day, Sotheby’s put the picture back on the block, explaining that its representatives “couldn’t reach a particular client by phone,” and that the Asian collector, possibly having just emerged from a signal-less tunnel, saw the light and took the low estimate at $1,945,000 net.

As for the stats, Sotheby’s boasted four artist’s records at auction, including Zhang Xiaogang’s Chapter of a New Century – Birth of the People’s Republic of China (1992), a shrine-like collage of a spotlighted red baby posing on a large trunk before a wall arrayed with 34 distressed and photocopied illustrations tracing major figures and events in the early history of the Chinese Communist Party. This academically inclined work, refreshingly unrelated to the much-seen “Bloodline” series (one of which broke $2 million that day), fetched $2.7 million from an anonymous phone bidder.

Fang Lijun’s 98.10.1, dated to China’s national day in 1998, broke the million-dollar barrier for the first time for the artist, doubling the high estimate to close at $1.5 million. This large fantastical canvas, depicting 11 bald-headed figures gesturing to the sky as they attempt to catch, or launch, an assortment of oddly colored roses, is one of Fang’s most attractive works.

The other record-breakers, Liu Ye’s Little Mermaid (2004), swimming in a superflat sea on the back cover of the thick, essay-rich catalog, cost an Asian private buyer $1,273,000, and another regional shopper in the room paid precisely the same sum for Cai Guo-Qiang’s Man, Eagle and Eye in the Sky: Eyes (2003), a six-paneled screen arrangement of angry burnt gunpowder traces that John Cage might have set to music.

The full-day sale, which realized $38 million and sold 82 percent of its 275 lots, was overwhelmingly Chinese. Korea popped up a few times but Japan seemed represented only by Yayoi Kusama (see AAP 16, 20, 24, 26, 30, 45, 48 & Almanac 2) and was otherwise invisible.

Turning to India, only one lot barely surpassed one million dollars (after commission), and some high estimates failed to move at all, possibly a healthy reminder that superb artworks, displaying a daunting range of creative imagination, which both Sotheby’s and Christie’s had in abundance, do not have to be conspicuously costly.

The best seller was Tyeb Mehta’s earthy-colored Mahishasura (1996) at Christie’s, a relative bargain at $1,105,000 including premium; a different work of the same title and subject (1997) sold at Christie’s exactly two years ago for over $1.5 million.

Also notable were TV Santosh’s double hitters: first at Christie’s with his day-glo painting of burkha-clad figures, Across An Unresolved Story, to a phone bidder for $180,000, and then the following day at Sotheby’s with his untitled iridescent op-art painting of a boy in bed, which went to a Beijing buyer for $170,000, nearly six times the high estimate. Also at Sotheby’s dedicated contemporary Indian sale were Subodh Gupta’s untitled lifesize sculpture of a family on a Vespa motorbike (2006), for $239,000 before commission, and a huge painting on metal shop shutters, Father (2002) by Atul Dodiya (see AAP 33, 47, 48, 49, 52), which doubled its high estimate to sell at $500,000.

Two weeks later in Hong Kong, Sotheby’s held its dedicated sale of Chinese contemporary art on October 7, bringing in a total of $42 million. Yue Minjun continued to soar in Asia, highlighting the day when his 1994 diptych The Massacre at Chios, estimated at $1-1.5 million, ultimately fetched $4 million with the buyer’s premium. Cai Guo-Qiang’s monumental Project for Extraterrestrials No. 10: Project to Extend The Great Wall of China by 10,000 Metres (2000) broke its high estimate, going for $2.6 million and setting a new record for the artist. Other million dollar makers were Liu Ye’s cherub-faced sailor standing before a sinking ship in The End of the Baroque and Zeng Fanzhi’s Mask Series No. 25 (1995), both paintings going for $1.3 million. The sale had no shortage of popular hits, including a total of eight Yue Minjuns and five Zhang Xiaogangs. However, Liu Wei’s iconic 1991 untitled painting of his father as a People’s Liberation Army officer, which was included in Tsong-zung (Johnson) Chang’s seminal exhibition “China’s New Art: Post-1989,” went virtually unnoticed, selling for the low sum of $793,000. Surely there is still room in the market for a seasoned collector to find historic works at a decent price.