Hong Kong Art Week Wraps up with Ho-Hum Auction Results and a Few More Big Sales at Art Basel

By Friday, as art professionals started picking up flights out of Hong Kong, the narrative for this year’s edition of Art Basel Hong Kong, and the surrounding art week, was pretty much set. It went something like this: A ton of energy and excitement met tentative, “deliberate” collectors who were focused on picking up only A+ material. That dynamic meant that blue-chip galleries closed deals on their top works during the Wednesday’s VIP preview, while small and medium-sized galleries spent days trying to do the same.

Little that came out over the weekend, as the fair wrapped up its public days, and the major auction houses held coinciding sales, suggested a dramatically different assessment.

On Friday, Christie’s held its second 20th/21st century auction at its swanky new Asia headquarters in the Henderson building. Much like the fair itself, that sale—the first aligned with Art Basel Hong Kong—generated a ton of buzz. The results were less exciting: a total of $73.3 million (including buyer’s premium) on 43 lots, with a 95 percent sell-through rate. (Two works were withdrawn prior to sale, and two went unsold.)

The star of the evening, Jean-Michel Basquiat’s 1984 painting Sabado por la Noche, sold to an Asian collector for $14.5 million, near its high estimate of $16.1 million. (The work had last sold in 2019 at Christie’s London for $10 million.) That good-enough result is the current highest price achieved at auction this year so far, as Christie’s Hong Kong president Francis Belin reminded the Art Newspaper.

Beyond the Basquiat, works by Pierre-Auguste Renoir and René Magritte landed above their high estimates, but there was little in the way of surprises, and the sale was done in just over an hour.

At Sotheby’s the following evening, the story was similar. The auction house said it had a whopping 35,000 visitors to its pre-sale exhibition of works to be sold—a statistic no doubt boosted by the fact that its new home is centrally located in the Landmark Chater shopping mall. (For those keeping track, that’s roughly five times as many visitors as Christie’s reported for its pre-sale show.)

Saturday’s modern and contemporary evening auction at Sotheby’s generated $38.3 million on 42 lots, with a 95 percent sell-through rate. While four lots were withdrawn and two unsold, the sale result put it closer to the pre-sale high estimate of $46.2 million.

European masters performed strongly, with a new auction record in Asia set for Marc Chagall at $4.44 million for the 1930 painting Fleurs de printemps (La Cruche aux fleurs de printemps). That work last sold at Sotheby’s New York in 2018 for $2.54 million. A sand and oil painting by Pablo Picasso, Le Miroir, went for $2.4 million, smack in the middle of its $1.9 million–$3.1 million estimate, while Renoir’s Baigneuse accoudée sold for $3.03 million, above its high estimate of $2.8 million. A monumental painting by Georg Baselitz—who also had several works sold at last week’s fair—went for $1.46 million on a $1.1 million–$1.9 million estimate.

Other bright spots in the sale were auction records for Li Hei Di, whose Drifted Petals on Her Lifted Mound sold for over double its high estimate at $180,000, and Ji Xin, whose Dawn sold for $327,000 on a $100,000–$190,000 estimate. In its post-sale press release, the auction house also noted the depth of bidding at the sale, with 18 bids placed for the Renoir, 20 for the Li work, and 12 for a work by Christine Ay Tjoe.

Still, the overall total told the clearer picture. According to art market research firm ArtTactic, the total for the marquee evening sales was $89.2 million, around 40 percent less than both the equivalent sale last spring and the sales last fall, which coincided with the grand openings of both houses’ new Asia headquarters. It was also the worst result since Fall 2018, the last time those sales totaled less than HK$1 billion.

At Art Basel’s VIP day Wednesday, many dealers told ARTnews that, even amid a clearly soft market, collectors were out in droves and they were engaged in sales discussions, even if it seemed it would take a couple days to close. That came to fruition by the end of the fair Sunday, with Art Basel posting a lengthy final sales report, and dealers seemingly happy enough with the haul.

Among the most significant sales that happened after Wednesday was Zeng Fanzhi’s untitled 2024 painting, which went for $1.5 million at Hauser & Wirth. (Zeng also had a work in the Sotheby’s sale, Mask Series 1995 no.12, which went for $1.4 million on a $1 million–$1.9 million estimate). The gallery also sold a Jeffrey Gibson painting, Your spirit whispering in my ear (2025), for $400,000 and an untitled Mark Bradford mixed media work for $300,000, both to Asian collectors. Pace said that, in the final hour of the fair, it sold a Lee Ufan painting for $1.1 million. The gallery had sold another Lee painting for $950,000 earlier in the weekend.

Xavier Hufkens reported selling a Milton Avery work for $800,000 and a Nicolas Party for $500,000 (roughly a quarter of the amount of another Party later sold at Sotheby’s). Tina Kim Gallery reported selling two Pacita Abad works, one for $500,000 to a museum in Southeast Asia, the other for between $250,000 and $500,000. Perrotin sold a new Takashi Murakami painting, Tan Tan Bo: Wormhole, for $1.35 million, while Massimo De Carlo sold a Jennifer Guidi painting for a value between $500,000 and $600,000. Galerie Lelong sold a David Hockney for $811,000 and a Jaume Plensa work for $400,000. Thaddaeus Ropac also added to its total with three major sales, Roy Lichtenstein’s Water Lily Pond with Reflections (1992) for $1.5 million, Alex Katz’s Ada by the Sea (1999) for $900,000, and a 1989 Robert Rauschenberg acrylic on paper for $200,000, which went to a Chinese museum.

That last bit pointed to the most encouraging trend noted during Hong Kong Art Week: the return of mainland Chinese mega-collectors. Dealers said on Wednesday and Thursday that the collector-founders of foundations or private museums from mainland China—many of whom were absent last year—were on the sales floor buying works.

Tina Kim and David Zwirner reported selling works to Chinese museums or foundations, and Sotheby’s reported that three of the top five lots on Saturday were sold to mainland Chinese collectors.