Christie’s Led Hong Kong’s Evening Sales, but Sotheby’s Won the Weekend’s Top Lot
Hong Kong’s marquee evening auctions offered a rare note of momentum this spring: Christie’s posted the strongest total of the week, while Sotheby’s captured the weekend’s most expensive single work with a Joan Mitchell canvas chased by online bidders.
At Christie’s Hong Kong 20th/21st Century Evening Auction on March 27, the house brought in HK$655.76 million ($83.8 million, prices include fees), a 17 percent increase over the equivalent sale last year. The auction was notably tight: 37 lots sold, zero withdrawals, and no works bought in, delivering a 100 percent sell-through rate. The top seller was Gerhard Richter’s “Abstraktes Bild” (1991).
Sotheby’s, however, claimed the weekend’s headline lot. Joan Mitchell’s “La Grande Vallée VII” (1983) sold to an online bidder for HK$137.4 million ($17.6 million). The house’s Sunday evening sale totaled HK$548.4 million ($70.3 million), an 84.3 percent jump from the comparable sale last March. Sotheby’s described the auction as “white glove,” though the designation came with an asterisk: five lots were withdrawn.
The strong result also marked a visible moment for Evelyn Lin, who presented her first evening auction since returning to Sotheby’s late last year as Asia chairman of Modern and contemporary art. Records were set in the sale for Singaporean-British artist Kim Lim and French artist Eugène Carrière.
Phillips took a different approach, offering a concise 16-lot lineup and setting a new record for Chinese ink artist Liu Dan.
Beyond totals and trophies, the weekend signaled a curatorial recalibration in Hong Kong’s evening-sale format. Although the events were branded as Modern and contemporary, both Christie’s and Sotheby’s ranged further afield than in previous seasons.
At Christie’s, that expansion reached back to the 17th century: a still life by Dutch Old Master Jan Goedaert sold for HK$10.2 million ($1.30 million), setting an artist record.
Sotheby’s pushed in another direction, folding antiquities into its evening sale. The selection included scholar’s rocks dating from the Ming to Qing dynasties, a tracery section from the Nave of York Minster in England, and a 15th-to-16th century vase from Korea’s Joseon Dynasty. The Korean vase sold for HK$6 million ($771,251) after competitive bidding.
“Today’s collectors — particularly in Asia — no longer think in categories,” Lin said in an email. “They think in quality.” She framed the inclusion of antiquities in a Modern and contemporary sale as a reflection of changing tastes in the region, especially among younger buyers who move between contemporary art, Impressionism, and historical material as part of a broader luxury lifestyle.
The upbeat weekend arrives as Hong Kong’s auction market works to regain altitude. The city’s total auction sales hit a decade low of $715 million in 2025, placing it behind Paris — which reached $854 million — for the first time and pushing Hong Kong to fourth in global rankings, according to the Artnet Price Database. While 7,314 lots were offered in Hong Kong in 2025, the lowest figure since 2020, the sell-through rate of 83 percent was the highest in a decade.
Bonhams also found traction with a small, single-owner sale on Saturday: six works by Japanese artist Yayoi Kusama (b. 1929) sold for HK$26 million ($3.3 million), led by a red “Pumpkin” painting (2000) that achieved HK$22.2 million ($2.8 million).
Taken together, the results suggest that Hong Kong’s evening auctions are not only competing on totals, but also testing a broader definition of “quality” — one that allows a Richter abstraction, a Mitchell landscape, and a Joseon vessel to share the same stage.
