LuxArtAsia

Christie’s HK will auction a spectacular array of masterpieces in cloisonné enamel from the Mandel Collection as part of its upcoming Spring Sale of Chinese Ceramics and Works of Art, on May 30.

Art lovers in Singapore have the opportunity this weekend to visit 14 art studios in Wessex Estate (Portsdown Road).The studios are opened from 11am-7pm and there are 20 artists to meet and talk to, working in a variety of media including painting, drawing, printmaking and ceramics. So go explore..

Spencer Hart

Men’s Fashion Week Singapore  is returning for its sophomore year Apr 18-22 with an interesting new list of Asian designers, loaded with Korean and Japanese names.

Sotheby’s Hong Kong sale of Southeast Asian Paintings will be headlined rare works of European Academic style painters who travelled to southeast Asia in the early 20th century: Walter Spies and Romualdo Locatelli.

Some slighly disappointing results at Sotheby’s NY sales of Chinese ceramics. The Mar 20 auction only sold 70.4% of its lots and 82.3% by value.  The sale of Fine Chinese Ceramics and Works of Art Sale brought in $20.7 million, above the pre-sale high estimate of $16.8 million, thanks mainly to the two Extremely Rare Famille Rose ‘Heaven and Earth’ Revolving Brushpots, with Qianlong seal marks which had only been estimated at $120/150,000 and $80/120,000 but brought in $3.5 million.

Bloodline – Big Family: Family No. 2 , the earliest work from Zhang Xiaogang’s Bloodline series ever offered at auction will headline Sotheby’s HK sale of Asian contemporary art on April 2. Other highlights include two important early works of Cynical Realism, namely 1993 No. 4 by Fang Lijun, the first-ever piece that the artist exhibited abroad, and A Good Dog by Liu Wei, which are expected to stir intense bidding.

When Choo Yilin established her company, Choo Yilin Artisan Jewellery, here in 2009, she knew she wanted her business to be profitable, but also to have a positive social impact.

An exceedingly rare 1941 Dr. Sun Yat Sen inverted center $2 black & blue New York print stamp, sold for HK$2.415 million at Zurich Asia's auction in Hong Kong, after fierce competition and set a new world auction record for any Republic of China stamp.

Andy Warhol, as you have probably never seen him before... Yes, you'll see the Liz and the Marilyn, and the Campbell Soups... But there is so much more to this exhibition.. Here are a few photos to whet your appetite

A few years ago, Budi Tek was largely unknown in the international art market, but last year, the Chinese-Indonesian collector was listed eighth on Art & Auction magazine’s top 10 most influential people in the art world. That put him not far behind Eli Broad, the billionaire U.S. businessman and museum founder; Dasha Zhukova, the Russian gallerist and oligarch’s girlfriend; and François-Henri Pinault, the luxury goods tycoon and owner of Christie’s auction house.

ALL PHOTOS Courtesy of Sundaram Tagore Gallery

Another good news for Singaporean artists. After Heman Chong having a solo show in London, it's the turn of Jane Lee to have her first solo exhibition in New York at the Sundaram Tagore gallery, starting April 5!

Han Yajuan

Generation Me: Lost in Transition – Niubi Newbie Project is now showing at Schoeni Art Gallery until April 7, putting the focus on a generation of young talent born post 1989.. They are the offspring of China’s one child policy and also the group coined as China’s ‘Me’ generation – a generation whose individualistic tendencies have been further encouraged by heavy influence of the internet, social networks and blogs, smart phones, comics, video games, digitalisation and globalisation.

Ever since it consolidated all its auction to Hong Kong, Sotheby's previews in Singapore have been a small affair. Still what it lacks in numbers it makes up in bling bling (small and easy to transport around Asian cities). On Mar 17-18, Sotheby's will showcase at The Regent Hotel in Singapore several highlights from its upcoming Spring auction, including a 5.03-carat Pear-shaped Fancy Vivid Pink Diamond and Diamond Ring (Est. US$5.4 – 6.7 million) and a 8.01-carat Emerald-cut Fancy Vivid Blue Diamond and Diamond Ring (Est.$11.5 - 14 million)


On the painting front, highlights will include  Fang Lijun’s 1997 No. 11; Walter Spies’s Waringin Mit Zwei Jungen Baliern (Banyan with Two Young Balinese);  Juan Luna’s En El Palco (In the Theatre Box)  and Chen Yanning’s Late Night .

Zao Wou-Ki’s masterpiece 25.06.86 will lead the Sotheby's HK auction of 20th century Chinese Art on Apr 2. This 1986 work, with an estimate of $2.3-3.6 million, was acquired by a European private collection decades ago, and makes its debut on the market. Created at the height of Zao’s international fame in the 1980s, the painting captured the artist’s ease in following his instincts and his sensitive and confident application of colours and brushstrokes. This vertically-aligned tripartite composition is inspired by traditional Chinese landscape painting with dark purples
suspended in mid-air placed side by side with deep azure, juxtaposed with vaporous, light grey hues resembling a waterfall.

The April 2 auction will offer more than 140 lots at a total estimate of $20.5 million

One of the fathers of the Cynical Realism movement in China is having a retrospective of sort of his work at the private Museum of Contemporary Arts in Singapore. Fan Lijun Documenta offers only one giant original painting, while the rest of the walls are covered with small reproductions of most of the works throughout his career, along with photographs and documentation that tried to put his artistic development in context.

The exhibition offers a fascinating inside into the career of this important artist and the evolution of his work, though unfortunatly the poignancy of many of his pieces, which are usually large canvases, is lost in the small format.

Watchmakers have long sought new ways of expressing time. One of the first unusual presentations was the wandering-hour clock, also called “floating hour dial” or “chronoscope,” which became popular in the 17th century. These clocks did without conventional hands and instead had a semicircular window in the upper half of the dial that revealed the hour numerals in succession, one at a time, as the day wore on.

In 1768, the Swiss watchmaker Pierre Jaquet-Droz began to create The Writer, his first of several automatons. The early humanoid robot of carved wood, 70 centimeters, or 28-inches, tall and seated at a small mahogany table, could write on paper using a goose feather quill.

Hard to imagine that this simple white lobed washer carries an estimate of $7.7-$10.3 million! The rare piece comes from the Song dynasty's fabled Ru kilns, a dream for connoisseurs, and will be the star lot of Sotheby’s Hong Kong's Fine Chinese Ceramics and Works of Art Spring Sale Series on April 4.

Don’t Forget To Remember is small group exhibiton at Art House bringing together art students from LASALLE College of the Arts around the topic of capturing and preserving transient memories. It features young Singaporean artists that have already started to make some noise, such as TR853-1 (always one of my favorites).

On March 22, Christie’s New York will offer Luminous Perfection: Fine Chinese Mirrors from the Robert H. Ellsworth Collection. A prominent dealer and collectorRobert H. Ellsworth is a legendary figure in the field of Asian art. He began to collect Chinese bronze mirrors more than sixty years ago and was able to amass a superb collection of rare and important mirrors that span more than 2,000 years from the Warring States period (475-221 BC) through the Ming dynasty (1368-1644). Comprising 70 lots, the sale is expected to realize in excess of $1.2 million and will be led by a rare silvery bronze octalobed mirror with cranes from the Tang dynasty (618-907) (Above).

FX Harsono is presenting his first solo exhibition in the United States, Writing in the Rain. This leading Indonesian artist has been a central figure of the Indonesian art scene since the early 1970s, always politically and socially engaged.

Rolex has announced the first round of finalists for the Literature, Theatre and Visual categories of its Mentor and Protégé Arts Initiative, and there is only one Asian on the list: the Malaysian-born, US-based author Preeta Samarasan.

Samarasan's debut novel, Evening is the Whole Day (2008), received extensive international praise, winning the Hopwood Novel Award, as well as being long-listed for the Orange Prize for Fiction. It was also a finalist for the Commonwealth Writers Prize.