Blue-chip Chinese contemporary art returns to red-hot

Asian art sales surged in Hong Kong early this week. Sotheby's sale of contemporary Asian art brought $18.7 million with Liu Ye's (b. 1964) "Bright Road" fetching $2.45 million, an artist record and nearly three times the estimate.

With rising real estate prices in Hong Kong and mainland China, there have been concerns of a bubble in those markets. However, Sotheby's expert Evelyn Lin maintains that prices are still low for Chinese modern art compared to Western counterparts.

“In terms of scale, China still has a long way to go to touch the Japanese exuberance of the 1980s,” wrote analysts at Nomura last week. “Total sales between 2000 and 2009 for Chinese arts amount to a little over $4 billion. This is in stark contrast to Japan, which experienced a massive investment of around $19 billion on art in just three years between 1987 and 1990.”