Sold-out auctions suggest Hong Kong’s art market is back. But is it?
‘White glove’ sales at Christie’s and Sotheby’s March Hong Kong auctions are cause for optimism, but must be put into perspective
The first of these milestone events occurred on March 27, when Christie’s 20th/21st Century Evening Sale was 100 per cent sold. The auction was led by Gerhard Richter’s HK$92.1 million (US$11.8 million) Abstraktes Bild and achieved a total of HK$655.8 million in sales.
Two days later, on March 29, Sotheby’s followed with its own “white glove” evening auction. It brought in HK$548.4 million after Joan Mitchell’s La Grande Vallée VII fetched HK$137.3 million to become the most valuable work by a female artist sold at auction in Asia.
Remarkably, the underbidder – the one who did not win the work but helped push up the final price – was a collector in their twenties. Meanwhile, Phillips’ evening sale, also on March 29, recorded a far-from-shabby 93 per cent sell-through rate.
What those impressive figures mean about the Asian art market is inconclusive. As art adviser Josh Baer points out in his newsletter, the Richter and the Mitchell could well have been bought by collectors outside Asia. Non-Asian buyers and bidders represented nearly 70 per cent of the bids at Sotheby’s, the auction house says.