Art Market Monitor

Global Coverage ~ Unique Analysis

Christie’s Announces 1000-year-old $50m Su Shi Scroll

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Hong Kong has been talking about Christie’s prized lot for several weeks. With a whisper estimate of HK$400m/$50m, the 1000-year-old Su Shi scroll is aiming to be among the most valuable works of art sold. Here’s Christie’s release:

Christie’s is proud to launch one of the world’s rarest Chinese paintings by Su Shi (1037-1101) – the pre-eminent scholar of the Song Dynasty and one of the most important figures in Chinese history. The painting, Wood and Rock, will lead Christie’s Hong Kong Autumn Sale 2018. This is an ink- on-paper scroll which depicts withered tree branches standing dignified alongside a curiously-shaped rock, resembling, as one renowned critic put it, giant creatures and dragons appearing and disappearing from stormy seas.

An esteemed scholar, writer, poet, painter, calligrapher and statesman, Su Shi was unparalleled amongst the Song literati. His artistic accomplishments, coupled with his repeated exiles in later life, made him one of the best-known literary and political figures in Chinese history.

Given the preeminence of the artist and the extreme rarity of his paintings, Wood and Rock is set to become one of the most important works ever auctioned in world history. The painting is part of an extended scroll which is complemented with calligraphy by Mi Fu – a renowned painter and calligrapher and a contemporary of Su Shi. Both Su Shi and Mi Fu are amongst the four most celebrated calligraphy masters of the Song period.

Sotheby’s Brings Pair to Re-Discovered Vase to Hong Kong

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Extending one of the most remarkable stories in the market for Chinese works of art, Sotheby’s will sell the pair to a Qianlong vase first re-discovered at a regional UK auction house in 2010 and hammered for £43m. That price was not paid for but the work sold a few years later for £25m, still a substantial sum.

Now Sotheby’s reveals that the Tang Ying vase was originally one of a pair of vases. Sotheby’s Nicholas Chow located the second vase which was owned by a Japanese collector for nearly a century and will auction it in Hong Kong this Fall:

Carved and exquisitely painted with four pairs of fish below Rococo-inspired motifs on a yellow sgraffiato ground, the exceptional famille-rose reticulated vase is skillfully modelled with an inner blue-and-white vase, which can be glimpsed through the openwork lattice, placing it among the most complex and rarest porcelains from the Qianlong period ever to have emerged on the market.

French Regional Auction Sells Chinese Moonflask for $5.7m

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The regional French auction house of Rouillac offered a Qianlong moonflask on Sunday June 10th for €600-800k but the international bidders had already discovered the work. The auction house already knew who its likeliest buyers would be. They played the national anthem of the People’s Republic of China before the lot was auctioned to bidders who drove the price to €4.1m on the hammer. That put the all-in price to the buyer at €4.92m ($5.79m.)

The work of art was originally acquired by a French Royal Navy Staff Officer on a mission to the China Sea in the years 1842-1847 and passed down through the family. It is a rare blue, white and celadon porcelain ‘Baoyueping Moonflask’ similar to one sold on April 10, 2006 at Sotheby’s Hong Kong for more than $2m.  Other similar ceramics in blue and white porcelain are in the collections at the Harvard Art Museum, Cambridge, the Yunnan Provincial Museum, Kunming, the National Museum of China, Beijing, and the Asian Art Museum, San Francisco. 

Chinese Chairs Spike 35x High Estimate at Bonhams

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It’s happening again. Starting in 2011, Western auction houses saw a rise in runaway lots in their Chinese works of art sales. Chinese buyers were scouring the globe looking for works to re-patriate (or, at least, to return to Chinese ownership.) The price spikes eventually dissipated both through a more efficient market and a decline in Chinese purchasing power.

Surprisingly when Chinese capital controls are said to threaten Mainland buying, Bonhams has just seen two different lots get bid into prices orders of magnitude above the estimates. Here’s what Bonhams said:

A Set of Four Huanghuali Folding Chairs were sold for £5,296,500 at Bonhams Fine Chinese Art sale in London today (Thursday 9 November). The chairs are the only known version of this form and type, and are widely considered a masterpiece of Ming Dynasty furniture. They had been estimated at £100,000-150,000. In a packed saleroom, the bidding war finally came down to a tense battle between a bidder in the room and one on the phone with the chairs finally knocked down to the phone bidder.

The chairs came from the collection of the distinguished Italian diplomat, Marchese Taliani de Marchio. From 1938 to 1946, Taliani served as Ambassador to the National Chiang Kai-shek Government in Nanjing. Despite spending only eight years in China, Taliani was a shrewd and gifted connoisseur who assembled a collection of exceeding rare and important pieces that conveys the rich history of Chinese decorative arts.

 

An important and exceedingly rare pair of Huanghuali Tapering Cabinets from the Ming Dynasty from the same collection, estimated at £200,000-300,000, sold for £1,688,750.

 

Sotheby’s Sets New $37.7m Record for Chinese Ceramic Bowl

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An anonymous buyer has set a new record for a Chinese work of art at Sotheby’s Hong Kong sale earlier today. Bidding took place over 20 minutes:

Sotheby’s in Hong Kong made a new world auction record for Chinese Ceramics when a Ru guanyao brush washer sold for HK$294.3 million / US$37.7 million. Ru guanyao, the court ware of the late Northern Song (960-1127), was commissioned by the imperial court and is the most revered of the Five Great Kilns. Its quasi mythical status over the millennium can be attributed to its short-lived production period, generally believed to not have exceeded twenty years. The washer is one of only four known heirloom Ru wares in private hands.

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