The best was hotly pursued, securing record prices, but there was little interest in the rest from buyers at the September Asian Art sales in New York

Apollo, Nov, 2004 by Susan Moore

Christie's trumpeted its highest total ever over $23m for its series of

Asian art sales in New York in September, and a number of extraordinary prices. At its Chinese art sale on 21 September, for instance, a Qianlong-period zitan-wood three railing, or sage's, bed (luohanchuang) became the most expensive Chinese bed ever sold at auction when it went to the Asian trade for $847,500 (476,123 [pounds sterling]). Its particular interest lay in its combination of traditional Chinese form and a quasi Western style rococo ornamentation; both the 'hundred antiques' motif and the scrolling acanthus leaf carving were of exceptional quality. The style is associated with the Yuanmingyuan Palace, remodelled in the Italian baroque style by the Emperor Qianlong in 1747 with the aid of Jesuit priests. It would seem that the market chose to believe that this piece came from the palace itself.

A mighty $1.07m-601,966 [pounds sterling]-changed hands for the sale's top lot, a large Late Shang or Early Western Zhou Dynasty ritual wine vessel and cover or you dating from the eleventh to tenth century Be. Along with a rarer Shang bronze owl-form covered vessel or xiaoyou from the collection of the late Doris Duke (it had been acquired by her father in 1937 for a massive $10,000), it was sold, for $511,500 (287,359 [pounds sterling]), to London dealer Roger Keverne buying on behalf of the new Compton Verney art gallery in Warwickshire, which now boasts the most important collection of archaic Chinese bronzes in Britain outside the British Museum.

Also sold to benefit the Doris Duke Charitable Foundation was an exquisitely refined pair of celadon-glazed cylindrical jars still with their covers and bearing the six-character mark of the Yongzheng emperor. Estimated at $70,000 $90,000, London dealers Eskenazi paid $466,700 for them (262,191 [pounds sterling]). The same firm paid $820,000 (456,367 [pounds sterling]) at Sotheby's on 23 September for a white-glazed pear-shaped vase or yuhuchun ping of the Yongle period beautifully incised with fruiting and flowering pomegranate, which came to the block with expectations of $50,000-$70,000. Such pieces are exceedingly rare, not least in mint condition. It was always going to soar way beyond its estimate, but what its price reveals is the sophistication of the current market even among the newer collectors of the Chinese mainland. It is no longer just porcelains decorated with colourful enamels and with mark and period that make the huge prices.

What we saw more generally in the Chinese sales was a continuation of past trends, that anything of real quality and merit at any level would rocket while the mediocre or even the reasonable fell by the wayside. (Keverne, for instance, bid $40,000 for a lacquer box estimated at $2,000$3,000 and still did not secure it.) The sales also emphasised the importance of provenance in the West for archaeological material, and the additional premium paid for a glamorous, Duke style pedigree on anything. Yet the series's successes disguise pages of unwanted, bought-in lots.

This best-and-the-rest scenario was neatly illustrated at Sotheby's first thematic sale devoted to The Arts of Buddha, on 22 September. A private Chinese collector paid $1.9m (just over 1m [pounds sterling])--four times the published estimate--for five sheets of calligraphic script of the 'Perfection of Wisdom' Sutra by Zhao Mengfu (1254-1322), signed and dedicated by the artist, mounted in album form, bound in silk, and bearing two of the artist's deals, sixty collectors' seals and one colophon. Another Chinese collector also paid over the odds for an outstanding and large patinated gilt-bronze figure of Avalokitesvara of the Sui or early Tang Dynasty (Fig. 1)--$596,000 (331,701 [pounds sterling])--yet the entire $5m sale was only 59 per cent sold by lot and 47 per cent sold by value. Sotheby's $3.9m general Chinese sale was 60 per cent sold by let; Christie's $11m sale, 63 per cent.

Christie's $4m Japanese and Korean Art sale on 22 September fared slightly better in terms of percentages. Its top lot here was a spectacular and hotly contested pair of early seventeenth-century six-panel screens representing a Portuguese ship coming in to Japan to trade (Fig. 4). This telling historical document speaks volumes of the shock of the Japanese's early encounters with the curious 'southern barbarians' and their dark-skinned Indian crew. The screens were finally knocked down to an American collector for $589,900 (329,553 [pounds sterling]). An exceptional single-owner group of Nob masks and robes totalled $400,000. The great casualty here was the pair of massive Meiji cloisonne enamel vases exhibited at the World's Columbian Exposition in Chicago in 1893, but bought in now at $400,000.

Interestingly, tire best results of the series were filed by Christie's Indian and South East Asian art sale on 23 September, which also included the fast growing field of twentieth century Indian painting. With an impressive 89 per cent sold by value and 77 per cent by lot, the sale totalled just over $8m, the highest sale total ever in this field. Its star piece was a Khmer sandstone figure of Uma, from the Angkor period and in the Baphuon style of the eleventh century, her smoothly polished flesh delectably tactile (Fig. 2). From the collection of Nathan L. Halpern, expected to fetch $200,000$300,000, she was carried off by a European collector for $1,127,500 (629,888 [pounds sterling]), a record auction price for a Khmer sculpture--and, indeed, any work of art in the field.