The Economist summarizes the peak increases in Fine Asian Arts for fall 2010 (in English). Excerpt:
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The last two months have seen some astonishing bidding in auctions of Chinese treasures. Record after record has fallen away as newly wealthy collectors from mainland China have piled into sale rooms in London, New York and Hong Kong, anxious to bring home their imperial cultural patrimony.
The market for Chinese art works has strengthened considerably over the past five years, and the high prices have drawn out a number of masterpieces from old collections in Europe and America. However, there is a danger of sellers becoming over-confident, even greedy. A close examination of some of the lots that have achieved record prices since early October shows that success cannot be taken for granted. Even the best pieces sometimes fail to excite a saleroom.
A double-gourd vase with an imperial seal mark from the Qianlong period was one of the star lots of Sotheby’s sale in Hong Kong on October 7th. The vase was one of 13 pieces in the sale that had once been in the collection of J.T. Tai. Born in 1910, Tai started out as an apprentice to his uncle who had an antiques shop in Wuxi, an old city south of the Yangtse delta. After Mao closed China to foreign trade, Tai and his family moved to Hong Kong in 1949 and eventually became the greatest of the post-war generation of Chinese art dealers, selling to such great collectors as Avery Brundage and Arthur Sackler.
So a consignment from Tai’s collection was worth marketing on its own merit, and Sotheby’s duly gathered the pieces together into a catalogue of their own. The vase was not the most significant of these, but it attracted the most attention. This was in part because it had come from Fonthill House where Alfred Morrison, Britain’s richest 19th-century commoner, had built up one of the greatest English collections of Chinese treasures. His heirs sold the vase at Christie’s in 1971, but a Fonthill provenance still counts for something.
Two bidders emerged from the early throng, and Alice Cheng, a Hong Kong collector and sister of Robert Cheng, a well-known octogenarian collector and dealer, proved the winner. Mrs Cheng paid HK$253m ($32.6m) for the vase, including commission and taxes, more than five times the top estimate.
Unhappy underbidders often come back and fight to a more successful finish another day. A Chinese collector who lost out in an earlier auction is believed to be the man behind the £53.1m sale of another Qianlong vase in a provincial auction outside London just four weeks later, on November 12th.
The yellow and turquoise vase, elaborately decorated with fish and flowers, has a double-walled construction so that an inner vase can be seen through the pierced outer wall. Intricate, finely carved and richly coloured, the vase was almost certainly fired in the imperial kilns for the emperor Qianlong, and is exactly the sort of work that appeals to the Chinese new rich.
The vase had been consigned by an anonymous brother and sister who were clearing out a suburban family home. They had no idea of its worth. Dealers who saw the piece in London during Asian Art Week were impressed. But neither they, nor the auctioneer, Peter Bainbridge, could have foreseen the 18 minutes of furious bidding it would arouse on the day. An agent acting on behalf of a mainland Chinese collector bought the vase on the telephone for nearly 36 times its top estimate, making it the most expensive piece of Chinese art ever sold at auction.
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