Christie’s
Christie’s Asian art sales brought in a total of $75.8 million for the week. The results include sales of fine Chinese ceramics and works of art ($38.8 million), jade carvings from a European collection ($8.6 million), A Connoisseur’s Vision: Property from the Xu Hanqing Collection ($13.1 million), Japanese and Korean art ($3.8 million), Indian and Southeast Asian art ($4.1 million), and South Asian modern and contemporary art ($7.4 million).
The Fine Chinese Ceramics and Works of Art sale was led by a rare blue-and-white Ming-style moon flask from the Qianlong period (1736–1795), which sold for $2.7 million, soaring beyond the pre-sale estimate of $500,000 to $700,000.
“Christie’s leads the Asian art market,” said Jonathan Stone, chairman and international head of Asian Art, in a press release. “Across all categories and all epochs of Asian art, Christie’s has dominated the market both this season and for the year, achieving an annual sold total of $193 million for 2011 in New York.”
“This represents nearly a 50 percent growth year on year and is a testament to the strength of the market and the quality of the sales that Christie’s presented,” Stone said.
Sotheby’s
Leading the ceramics and works of art sale was a “rare and important gilt-bronze votive stele of Buddha, Northern Wei Dynasty, dated A.D. 471, which fetched $1,022,500, comfortably exceeding the $600,000 to $800,000 estimate,” according to the press release.
The dedicated sale of Fine Chinese Classical Painting was a first for Sotheby’s after a decade of grouping them together with the other sales. Leading this sale was the Running Script Transcription of an Epitaph, which sold for over double the estimate at $782,500.
According to Sotheby’s, it was written “by Dong Qichang (1555–1636), who is known as the most influential artist of his time.” “The eight-leaf album … was appraised by its then-famed collector Kong Guangtao as ‘genuinely stately and thoughtful in spirit, so fluid and elegant as if executed with divine power.’”
