Preview 20 Modern & Contemporary Art Highlights from The Hong Kong Sales

Considered one of the greatest stars of the art world by the tender age of 21 and frequently compared to Pablo Picasso, the French Expressionist painter Bernard Buffet was named one of the “Fabulous Five” cultural figures of post-war France in a 1958 The New York Times article, alongside Brigitte Bardot, Françoise Sagan, Roger Vadim and Yves Saint Laurent. Le Cirque – Le jongleur is representative of Buffet’s “Miserabilist” paintings, which encompassed scenes at the circus, women, landscapes and still lifes. Slender graphic forms executed in a sombre palette spoke of art history, popular culture, life and the inevitability of death – a timely expression of the melancholic, reflective mood that seized France in the aftermath of the Second World War. Today Buffet’s work can be found in public collections around the world including the Centre Georges Pompidou in Paris, the National Museum of Western Art in Tokyo, and the Tate in London.

With an encyclopedic knowledge of aesthetic styles from Mannerism to Cubism, George Condo deploys his limitless knowledge of art history and popular culture to explore the limits and extremes of a fragmented psyche in his portraits of humanity. The embodiment of the classical dichotomy between the Apollonian and Dionysiac, Red, White and Black presents the rational, ordered being in the form of the classical female nude and its struggle against the emotional, the irrational and the chaotic. Seductive and repellent in equal measure, its comely subject fragments into clownish absurdity, blood-red hysteria, and a collision of teeth, eyes and hair as Condo skirts between the realms of the familiar and uncanny. Fresh to auction, this work is part of a series made in 2014 where Condo explored Harold Rosenberg’s idea of ‘action painting’, initially used in reference to the Abstract Expressionist painters (e.g. Willem de Kooning and Jackson Pollock), to create his own 'action portraits'. The push and pull between figuration and abstraction was already a cornerstone of Condo's oeuvre, and with the inclusion of gestural painting techniques, this work brings that to the next level.

Condo’s self-invented concepts of “artificial realism” and “psychological cubism” reveal an artist whose ability to perceive “all of someone’s emotional potentialities at once” posits him as an heir to Picasso. His work forms part of top institutional collections including the Centre Pompidou in Paris, the Tate Modern in London, and the Museum of Modern Art in New York.

Born in Tokyo, Foujita landed in Paris in 1913 and quickly rose to become one of the most recognisable faces of the School of Paris. Sensuous sumi ink lines deftly articulating the contours of milky-white, radiant porcelain skin – achieved through a secret recipe of flaxseed oil, crushed chalk and magnesium silicate – became his signature style. Nu dans l'atelier captures the pensive expression of Edmée Lamiral, daughter of Boulogne sculptor Charles Paul Lamiral. Subject of one of the 6,000 female nude portraits completed by Foujita in his studio on Rue Henri-Martin, Lamiral was a stalwart of the 1920s Parisian art scene, posing for many artists in Montparnasse. For Foujita, the naked female form was a vessel that merged his Japanese cultural background with Western subject matter. Posed full-length in the nude and face-on to the viewer, Lamiral transgresses the traditionally modest style of Japanese nude portraiture, whilst the poster of the lolling feline pinned to the wall behind her playfully incorporates Foujita’s other favourite subject matter and an important symbol of luck in Japanese culture. Bridging tradition and modernity in his cross-cultural life and practice, today Foujita’s work can be found in the collections of the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York, the Art Institute of Chicago and the Los Angeles County Museum of Art, among others.

Stellar Head subsumes the viewer in a riotous orgy of colour and form. “It’s a dance between more compulsive, spontaneous mark-making and reflective sort of teasing out of various associations,” Bull explained of her process, “Then I go back in with more automatic painting. Eventually, the older layers start to act as a relief. It becomes this interwoven experience of surprising landscapes or dreamscapes.” Slow, hypnotic whirls overlap and blend with gestural marks dabbed, stabbed, twisted and scraped onto canvas. Eventually, Bull’s immersive abstract dreamscapes bloom into something far greater than the sum of their parts, a whirlwind energy and source of light that defies explanation or taming. Now one of the art world’s brightest young stars, Bull unveiled Stellar Head in 2019 at one of her earliest solo exhibitions, “First Meetings” at High Art in Paris. Her works are held in prominent institutional collections including the Museum of Contemporary Art, Los Angeles; Dallas Museum of Art; and Institute of Contemporary Art, Miami.

Marking the artist’s debut at auction, Gravity expands upon Kreyn’s “Storm” series, a suite of luminous large-scale landscapes presented at the 2024 Venice Biennale which celebrate the Romantic sublime in nature. Celestial light streaking across the stormy waters evokes the primordial forces of nature to dazzling and devastating effect. Birth and rebirth has been a pivotal part of Kreyn’s story: born in the Soviet Union, a three year-old Kreyn left with her parents just weeks before the collapse of the Berlin Wall in 1989 and moved to Florida. Aged 10 she nearly lost her mother to a serious illness, and the global pandemic of 2020 prompted a period of personal and creative re-birthing for Kreyn. A student of mathematics and philosophy at the University of Chicago, Kreyn taught herself to paint from closely studying works by artists such as El Greco and Diego Velazquez. Drawing “polymathic connections between disparate fields” in her own words, Kreyn meditates on nature and the materiality of time, frequently referencing the Orphic egg that represented the start of the universe in ancient Greek cosmology to create “deep atmospheric space” that feels immutable and yet strikingly contemporary in spirit. Kreyn’s public works include The Shakespeare Cycle, a collection of paintings based on The Bard, commissioned by Andrew Lloyd Webber, now on permanent display at London’s historic Theatre Royal Drury Lane.

A pioneer of Chinese abstract oil painting, the legacy of Wu Dayu's theory of Shixiang (Dynamic Expressionism) is plainly evident in the work of his students at the Hangzhou National Art Academy – among them the three legendary masters of Chinese modernism Zao Wou-Ki, Chu Teh-Chun and Wu Guanzhong. Exposed to Fauvism and Cubism as a young student in Paris, Wu adopted a style incorporating dramatic chiaroscuro and sculptural interplays of light and dark that paid homage to his modernist teachers in 1920s Paris, in particular Georges Braque, the founder of Cubism, and the sculptor Antoine Bourdelle. A profoundly lyrical form of abstraction vitalises Rhymes of Beijing Opera-49: influenced by traditional Chinese art since childhood, Wu applied vibrant oil pigments in red, blue, and yellow that echo the classic colours of Peking opera masks and costumes. Energetic strokes collide and swirl like dancing figures on a stage.

Rhythmic, mesmerising undulations of repetitive, thickly painted lines and dots in metallic white acrylic paint shroud the inky surface of Nets - Infinity. Executed nearly 50 years after Kusama first began working on her famed “Infinity Nets” series, Nets- Infinity exudes a new visual sensation whereby the intricate patterning of undulating forms from her early Infinity Nets, inspired by the Pacific Ocean which Kusama excitedly glimpsed through her plane window as she arrived in the United States , takes up a new fishnet form weaved from individual polka dots interlinked by connecting lines. After the stultifying existence of early life in Japan, a society “too small, too servile, too feudalistic, and too scornful of women,” the US represented the gateway to the freedom and boundless possibilities Kusama craved. Appearing at auction for the first time, Nets - Infinity exemplifies the sublime beauty which characterises the very best of the artist’s oeuvre.

For over three decades Japanese artist Yoshitomo Nara’s beguiling portraits of childhood misadventure and melancholia have retained their unerring ability to tap into universal emotions of ennui and isolation. The youngest by far of three boys and working parents, Nara’s childhood in the rural apple-growing region of Aomori, Japan, was characterised by a piercing loneliness. “I was lonely, and music and animals were a comfort,” he reflected. “I could communicate better with animals, without words, than verbally with humans.” Little children appeared in his work following his move to Germany, when language barriers reignited a period of acute solitude.

One of the first canvases to feature Nara’s bunny motif and fresh to auction, Little Bunny in the Box is only the third example from this series on canvas to ever come to auction. The year before the present work was created in 1995, Nara received a solo exhibition at Bathhouse in Tokyo, which marks a turning point in the artist's career. Following the exhibition’s success, Nara exhibited in the US for the first time at the Blum & Poe Gallery in Santa Monica. In 1996, he then took part in group exhibitions at the Hiratsuka Museum of Art and Miyagi Museum of Art, Sendai. He gained attention as part of “Japan’s New Pop” along with Takashi Murakami, Makoto Aida, Tarō Chiezō, and Mariko Mori.

Nara’s little bunny-costumed child sat in his box captures the vulnerability and in-betweenness of youth – between certainty and precariousness, between home and nowhere. This work is instantly recognisable, having featured on a series of posters produced by the artist’s N’s Yard gallery. The figure of the bunny with its playful sloping ears would go on to inspire the artist’s celebrated Sleepless Night (Sitting) (1997) painting the following year, which is now in the collection of the Rubell Museum, and series of sculptures (2007) which is highly sought after by collectors and fans of the artist.

Painted after the master turned 78, 04.08.98 epitomises the journey of Zao Wou-Ki from the young renegade who graduated from the Hangzhou National Art Academy and found his way to Paris in search of a radical new artistic language, to a bona fide art world giant who had found a way to unify the innovations, traditions and cultures of the East and West. The youthful energy of his early abstract works became subsumed into an otherworldly search for an inner landscape described by the literati painters of Zao’s motherland, a “space of dreams” invisible to the eyes but known intimately to the heart.

During the 1980s and 1990s, Zao transitioned to Chinese ink painting, which profoundly influenced his oil compositions. His use of "abundant ink" in 04.08.98 as a spatial treatment signifies a significant evolution in his works, enabling him to employ color to create spatial depth. He skillfully manipulates the principles of "five colours of ink", utilizing dry, wet, thick, thin, and concentrated ink throughout his compositions. The central area features a robust application of wet black paint, contrasted with expanses of bold and light ink at the bottom, enhancing the rhythm of depth and perspective within the work. 04.08.98’s sweeping oil layers in cerulean blue and ochre nod to the Romantic landscapes of J.M.W. Turner, whilst the powerful inky black strokes spattering the canvas like a bird taking flight recall the spontaneous xieyi (“freestyle”) techniques beloved by Chinese literati artist-scholars as far back as the 5th century. The embodiment of his given name, “Wou-Ki”, the artist with “no limits”, Zao never ceased to find ways to transcend his roots and influences in search of an universal expression of the sublime.

One of leading figures of Japanese Modernism, Zenzaburo Kojima landed in Tokyo in 1913 to pursue his dream of becoming an artist. He developed a uniquely avant-garde visual language, shaped particularly by his time in France between 1925 and 1928. Immersing himself in classical and modern European art whilst collecting catalogues of works by Paul Cezanne and Henri Matisse, he blended the forms, palette and aesthetic sensibilities of East and West to create a style known as “Neo-Japanism”. Nude sitting in rattan chair, one of only 50 or so nudes created in Kojima’s lifetime, is testament to Kojima’s experimental spirit and combines ukiyo-e flatness of colour and composition with a voluptuous, volumetric sculptural form informed by Cubism. Kojima’s nude paintings from the same period can also be found in the collections of the Fukuoka Prefectural Museum (Woman combing hair, 1927-28) and Tokushima Modern Art Museum (Nude sitting in rattan chair, 1927-28), both in Japan.

Gormley’s SMALL RATE III embraces dichotomy: cast iron and air, cubic form and organic subject. Most of all, it investigates the collision of the human form with the world around it. Aspirations meet realities as engineering meets art. Lives are formed at the nexus of opposing forces, as we accept adjustments, compromises and spatial limitations in our quest for self-fulfillment. The angular homunculus is, nevertheless, a refuge of strength and resilience, and a testament to the power of human achievement and our innate indefatigability.

This beautiful, bubble-gum hued tondo from Japanese self-taught artist Ayako Rokkaku exudes the dreamy drama of female awakening. The natural and constructed world play merely a peripheral role in Untitled, which places the large-eyed girl in the white dress at the centre of her own interior narrative. Rokkaku’s unique finger-painting technique is the conduit of a raw intimacy, comprising layered psychological insight, complicity and mutual understanding. The painting reminds us of the unique value of the human experience and a cherishing of our own personal ideals. The present has been exhibited in Rotterdam’s Kunsthal Gallery (COLOURS IN MY HAND, June - August 2011) and Seoul’s Hangaram Art Museum (Dreams in My Hand, December 2023 - March 2024).

A student of Lin Fengmian – who also taught Zao Wou-Ki – Chu Teh-Chun is emblematic of the productive exchange of artistic ideas between France and China, with Paris at its creative heart. The Suzhou-born artist moved to Paris in 1955, and remained there for the rest of his life. The zesty orange of Textures Contrastées (2006) invites poetic vision. The brightening background appears like the dawn of a new artistic day, or the surface of an undiscovered planet, where assorted limbs beat a path onwards to a brighter future.

The low vanishing point of Les nuages by Claude Monet allows the clouds to take prevalence in the composition. Trees rise from the lowest portion of the painting as if pointing to the swirling vapours in the air above. The cloud features as an almost sculptural mass, suggestive of monumentality and a sense of the eternal. The Impressionist master’s work is a pastel creation of subtle, uncomplicated colour, dominated by deep blue, dark green and the grey-white hues of overhead clouds. The format of the painting seems to suggest the following: whatever is occurring on Earth, just as much is happening overhead.

British artist Damien Hirst first exploded onto the art scene with The Physical Impossibility of Death in the Mind of Someone Living (1991). His works have examined death from multiple angles ever since, from our unwillingness to confront mortality, to the state of death as a beautiful counterpoint to life itself. Beautiful Architect is a work of butterflies and household gloss on canvas, musing on mathematics, geometry and infinity. Despite the butterfly forms, the painstakingly meticulous symmetry is reminiscent of Islamic art. The artwork points both to an eastern tradition, and to the most pressing question of all. Is the most beautiful architect ultimately human or divine, and what happens after death?

One of the first graduates of the École des Beaux-Arts de l’Indochine in Hanoi, Le Pho studied under prominent French artists Victor Tardieu and Joseph Inguimberty before winning a scholarship to study at the École des Beaux-Arts in Paris. This painting reflects both Le Pho’s exquisite handling of the complex medium of ink and gouache on silk, and his deftly assured depictions of femininity. The ethereal curtain which partly veils the subject’s face and hair is delicately insinuated into a scene which is emblematic of mindful, untroubled leisure. The avian visitors nestled in the foliage rest on a simple green barricade, conveying a tranquil relationship between the inner world of the home and an outer garden. The black hair of Le Pho’s subject and graceful dress at no point threaten to overpower a painting of dexterous layers and tender harmonies.

Lampflower (1994) is a mazily meandering work of boldness and simplicity. A sinuously verdant stalk traces a winding path from the ground to a bulbous visage overhead. The serpentine line is a coiled frame of architectural strength, holding up a pendulous face which seems simultaneously hefty and weightless. The gently plump face exudes cute-bomb calmness and serenity, eyes closed in blissful harmony with its environment. Nara resists painting the background details which would situate this image in the real world and disturb its pristine balance and unity with itself.

Yun Hyong-keun is an artist of restraint and sophistication. Born in 1928, Yun is a prime mover in Korea’s Dansaekhwa movement of the 1960s and 1970s and Umber-Blue Ochre Blue is an example of Yun’s signature style of applying layers of paint onto linen. The seeping paint in the linen fibre thereby echoes Korea’s long ink painting tradition. This congress of the classical and the modern finds further nuance in the artist’s sympathy with western contemporaries, including Mark Rothko. Umber-Blue Ochre Blue describes twin verticals ascending in darkness, the halo that surrounds each, and the flowing energy in between. Presence and absence abound in equal measure with no sense of opposition.

Zao Wou-Ki’s 04.03.63 is named after its completion date, in line with the artist’s convention. The explosion of white brightness is interpolated with black ruptures of its surface and a gentle craquelure. The artwork has a porcelain-like fragility, and a cloud-like sense of the amorphous. The renowned Zao graduated from the Hangzhou National Art Academy before later becoming a member of the École des Beaux-Arts in Paris. One of Chinese art’s “Three Musketeers” alongside Chu Teh-Chun and Wu Guanzhong, Zao is an exponent of an intense, mesmerising abstraction which both resists and demands imaginative interpretation.

Shanghai-based Zhang Enli zooms in on a bed, offering a richly varying set of surfaces. Floor, bedframe, sheets, wall and pillow are a textural journey with flashes of luminescence, rumpled shadow, creased flatness and plump shabbiness. The state of the bed is itself as much an exercise in figuration as it is in absence, a psychological depiction of the bed’s owner, missing from the picture. The red-tinged wooden floors flow forward with a sense of purpose, whilst the bed itself suggests a cozy, languorous decay. The visible grid lines and focus on everyday household items or furniture are a signature of the artist’s style, whilst also placing the work in conversation with forerunners such as Vincent van Gogh’s The Bedroom (1888).