The world’s finest now in China
Liu Yiqian made histor y in November 2015 when he snapped up Amadeo Modiglia n i ’s Reclining Nude f o r $ 17 0 .4 m i l l i o n a t a Christie’s auction in N e w Yo r k . L i u , w h o w i t h w i f e Wa n g We i had set up Shanghai’s twin L ong museums and a third in Chongqing, is believed to own the largest private art collection in China. Liu had casually asked his wife during the auction preview in Hong Kong if she fancied the Modigliani. When she said yes he bid for the painting on the telephone without her knowledge, procuring it, ultimately, for a sum that was the secondhighest fetched by an artwork at auctions.
Movie mogul Wang Zhong jun, who chairs Huayi Brothers Media Group, is a trained painter himself. A fan o f t h e Im p r e s s i o n i s t school of painters, he already had works by Pierre-Auguste Renoir and Camille Pissarro in his kitty when he saw Van Gogh’s Vase with Daisies and Poppies at an auction preview at Sotheby’s Hong Kong office. When the painting went under the hammer at Sotheby ’s New York auc tion in November 2014, Wang was pleasantly surprised to find his most favorite Impressionist master painter was well within his budget. He bid with confidence and ultimately took home a Van Gogh classic for $61.8 million.
Real estate tycoon Joseph Lau Luen-hung paid $17.4 million at a Christie’s auction in New York in 2006 for A n d y Wa r h o l ’s p o r - trait of Chairman Mao Zedong — a jaw-dropping amount for a work of pop art at the time. Lau told the media he had struck a bargain. Paintings of Mao from the same series — created by Warhol in 1972 in his generic style, using psychedelic color blocking — are still in high demand although the prices have not met the projections made back then. Last year Sotheby’s sold one of these for $40,000.