The New York Times reports on a record-breaking sale at an art auction in Hong Kong:
More than 100 works from the Estella Collection, which Sotheby’s has called the largest and most important trove of Chinese contemporary art, were on the block. In the biggest sale of the session, “Bloodline: Big Family No. 3,” a 1995 work by Zhang Xiaogang, one of China’s most prominent painters, sold for just over $6 million, the highest price ever paid for a painting by a Chinese contemporary artist.
The oil on canvas depicts a family of three during China’s tumultuous Cultural Revolution, when children were sometimes led to denounce their parents. Three collectors bid feverishly for the piece, which went for well above its high estimate of about $3.4 million. Sotheby’s identified the buyer, who bid by telephone, as a Taiwan-born collector living in the United States.
