Long Museum’s Sale at Sotheby’s Hong Kong Brings Disappointing Results

While every art world prognosticator is biting their lip in anticipation for the November sales in New York, which tend to provide a true picture of the art market, a sale of works from Shanghai’s Long Museum at Sotheby’s Hong Kong was also being closely watched for what it might say about the industry. The museum’s founders, Liu Yiqian and Wang Wei, made a name for themselves by scooping up tony works for lavish prices, but the pieces for the works they sold this time largely failed to go for such flashy sums.

Generally, the sale, which was held on Thursday, did not live up to the ado that often surrounds Liu, who once paid for a $36 million rare porcelain cup from the Chengua period by swiping his American Express Centurion card 24 times. That purchase, along with one of a $170 million Amedeo Modigliani painting in 2015, have led many to consider him a premier collector in China and landed him a spot on the ARTnews Top 200 Collectors list.

Many were shocked when the Sotheby’s sale was announced. As ARTnews reported in August, it is highly irregular for such high-profile collectors who are so active to sell works from their holdings at auction, especially when they come from a private institution. Even more mysterious was the reason for the sale. Museum representatives would not comment on it, but the auction house told ARTnews that the proceeds will go toward “initiatives and future acquisitions at the museum,” which makes this a large-scale deaccession.

Among the highlights of the sale were René Magritte’s Le Miroir Universel (estimate $9 million–$12 million), A Picture of a Lion by David Hockney ($5.4 million–$7 million), and Modigliani’s Paulette Jourdain, which in 2015 sold at Sotheby’s for $42.8 million and was expected to top $45 million this turn on the auction block.

Paulette Jourdain sold for $34.8 million with premium, hammering at a full $10 million less than its estimate, but it still managed to make two auction records, one for the highest price paid for a Modigliani in Asia, another for the most expensive Western work of modern art sold in the continent.

There were other records, too. The sale had the highest total of any single-owner sale in Asia. Magritte’s Le miroir universel made a record for the artist’s work in Asia, selling for $9.9 million. (That sum, however, is still about an eighth of Magritte’s worldwide auction record.) Works by Jonas Wood, Alex Katz, and Mark Bradford also set record highs for sales in Asia.

But the numbers overall aren’t impressive, which could mean that assumptions about the end of the Covid-era seller’s market, and the lackluster state of the market in general, may be correct. Sources told ARTnews that the bidding was restrained for more than a few artists, and at times even disappointing.

When it was announced, the sale was expected to bring in around $150 million. The total with fees was less than half that: $69.5 million, more than $20 million beneath the low estimate of $95.4 million. 

A few works did exceed expectations. Ji Xin’s 2021 painting Room with Venus nearly quadrupled its high estimate, selling for $243,300. And, bouncing off momentum gained by a Gagosian show of New York devoted to Tetsuya Ishida, the late Japanese artist’s 1999 painting Wild, featuring a suit-jacketed man staring at horses emerging from a set of lockers, sold for $567,700, more than doubling its high estimate. Yet these works did not set records for either artist, and besides, both were anomalies in an auction with few runaway successes.

Of the 39 works on offer, 10 failed to sell, including Hockney’s A Picture of a Lion. While the auction house reported that the auction was global, with bidding coming from 25 different countries, 75 percent of the bidders were Asian and seven of the top ten lots went to Asian buyers. 

The uninspiring outcome could be a result of a sluggish Chinese economy, a declining stock market, and a bourgeoning crisis in the housing market. Still, one source familiar with the Asian art market recently told ARTnews that the those who hold the most wealth are often the ones least effected by the country’s economic woes. If that’s the case, perhaps collectors are holding on to the cash for the New York sales, where the most coveted works are sold.

While it’s unclear what Liu and Wang have planned for the Long Museum, industry insiders told ARTnews that the couple is still very active in the secondary market, particularly at Sotheby’s. With this influx of capital, it will be interesting to see how they plan to bolster and refine their holdings, whether or not their acquisitions are paid for using an American Express card.