Fiery Chinese dragons buck slowing art market trends

A TREASURE trove of rare imperial objets d'art from the Qing dynasty (1644-1911), including an emperor's seal and a scroll painting of military scenes, defied the slowing art market to fetch record prices at auction in Hong Kong yesterday.

Demand for Chinese contemporary art and 20th century items had fallen foul of the global financial crisis, but the appetite for historical Chinese art remained strong at Sotheby's biannual auction in Hong Kong.

The highlight of the "Legacies of Imperial Power" sale was a white jade seal from the court of the emperor Qianlong, who ruled China for 60 years from 1736 to 1795. The seal is engraved with two coiled dragons with flaring nostrils and horns symbolising power and vigour, and bearing the words "Qianlong yubi" (in the imperial hand of Qianlong). The piece went for a record HK$63.4 million (€5.9 million).

The seal, removed from the Hall of Imperial Longevity in Beijing's Forbidden City in 1900, was one of eight jade seals from the estate of French industrialist Emile Guimet, and all found buyers.

Another highlight was a 15-metre handscroll commissioned by Qianlong to show him leading 16,000 troops in a parade. The scroll went for HK$67.86 million (€6.34 million), a world record for a Qing painting, but well shy of a pre-sale estimate of $HK80 million (€7.47 million).

The scroll had previously been sold by Sotheby's rival Christie's International for HK$30 million (€2.8 million) in April 2004.

In the Sotheby's sale, 19 of 47 prominent works went unsold and others barely hit low estimates. The Sotheby's and Christie's biannual auctions are a key indicator of the health of the art market.

For 20th century Chinese artwork, only 39 of 110 lots were sold as buyers outside areas such as China, Hong Kong and Taiwan stayed away. Earlier this week, a necklace set with a 102.56-carat yellow diamond - the biggest of its kind to appear at auction - failed to find a buyer at Sotheby's. The necklace had a high estimate of HK$74 million (€6.91 million).

This article appears in the print edition of the Irish Times