New York’s Contemporary sales were dominated by a renewed appetite for top Abstract Expressionist works. But the trend is hardly local as Hong Kong’s contemporary sales last weekend were also motored along by a taste for classic 20th Century abstraction. But in the Chinese case the artists valued are not Pollock, Rothko, Diebenkorn and Kline but Chu The-Chun and Zao Wou-ki. Here’s Colin Gleadell on the subject:

Abstract paintings by artists who worked in the West in the 1950s and 1960s proved most successful. A large triptych by Chinese-born Singaporean Cheong Soo Pieng, shown at the Redfern gallery in London in 1963, leapfrogged a $58,000 estimate to fetch a record $345,000, and paintings by Chu Teh-Chun and Zao Wou Ki, who have lived in Paris since the 1950s, dominated the top lots. A painting by Zao, bought in Paris in 2008 for $696,000, sold for $2.9 million, and a large abstract by Chu, who combines Chinese brush painting and Western-style abstraction, sold for a record $7.8 million, both to Asian collectors.

Christie’s to the Rescue (Telegraph)