Asians pay vase prices

A Chinese pot wins a record $83 million at auction.

An elaborate Qianlong dynasty porcelain vase has sold for a record £51.6 million ($83 million) as Chinese buyers competed for imperial-associated trophies at the “Asian Art in London” event.

The 16-inch-high piece was discovered during a routine house clearance, said Bainbridges, a London auction house. It had estimated the vase to fetch £800,000-1.2 million. The hammer price was £43 million before 20 per cent fees, making it the highest for any Chinese artwork sold at auction.

“Everyone was excited about this vase,” David Baker, one of the dealers at Asian Art in London, said. “It’s an exceptional Imperial piece in perfect condition with the most amazing reticulated decoration. It’s exactly what Chinese buyers want at the moment.”

 

Asian bidders are prepared to pay ever-higher prices for rare objects associated with Chinese emperors. The vase beat the record for any Chinese work of art sold at auction, $65.95 million paid for a 15-metre-long Song Dynasty scroll in June 2010. Last month, an 18th-century Imperial vase was bought by the Chinese collector Alice Cheng for a record $32.6 million at Sotheby’s, Hong Kong. Asian art raised £245.5 million of auction sales at Christie’s International in the first half, a 121 per cent increase on the same period last year.

“I’m thrilled that a provincial auction room can show what it can do,” Peter Bainbridge, director of the auction house, said in an interview after the sale. “I’m also delighted to have handled such an astonishing work of art. I didn’t quite realise how exciting it was.”

There were about 100 people in the saleroom — which was cluttered with Victorian mahogany furniture — including collector Robert Chang, the brother of Alice Cheng, and Hong Kong dealer William Chak.

A bidding battle between six people in the room and three telephone bidders was won by a man who sat on a gilded sofa at the front of the room. The buyer, who refused comment after the sale, was a Beijing-based agent, according to Bainbridge.

Hundreds of dealers, collectors and their agents had flown in for Asian Art in London’s nine-day schedule of gallery exhibitions, museum shows, lectures and auctions.

The most valuable dealer exhibit was a Qing dynasty porcelain vase from London-based Eskenazi Ltd with a price tag of about $25 million. The vase, from the reign of the Emperor Yongzheng, is painted with a dragon in purple enamels. It is the sole survivor of a group of puce-decorated wares made in the Imperial palace, Beijing, from 1723 to 1735, Eskenazi said in its 50th anniversary catalog of a dozen musem-quality Chinese pieces spanning three millennia. “It sold to an Asian buyer very close to the asking price,” gallery director Giuseppe Eskenazi said.

At Bonhams, an 18th-century white jade seal commissioned by the Qianlong Emperor sold for £2.7 million ($4.3 million) to a Beijing-based buyer against competition from two other Asian bidders. The seal, carved with a dragon among cloud scrolls and bearing the inscription “Self-Strengthening Never Ceases”, had been estimated to sell for £3 million, said Bonhams.

“There is no other work of art with which the Emperor would have been as personally associated as with his personal seal,” Asaph Hyman, a Bonhams specialist, said on the company’s website.

The auction record for a Chinese Imperial seal is the $15.6 million for a white jade example at Sotheby’s Hong Kong on October 7.

Bonhams’s seal had been in a European private collection since the 1960s. It is documented as having been made in 1793 for the Qianlong Emperor’s 80th birthday celebration and would have been used by the monarch to make impressions in the corners of his artworks, according to the catalog.

Asian Art in London 2010 ends November 13. Visit www.asianartinlondon.com