SEA artists’ top lots fail to sell at Sotheby’s auction, Georgette Chen work sold near low estimate

SINGAPORE – Works by Filipino modernist artist Anita Magsaysay-Ho and Singapore pioneer artist Cheong Soo Pieng failed to find buyers at Sotheby’s spring sale at the Conrad Singapore Orchard Hotel on June 9.

Paghuhuli Ng Mga Manok (Catching Chickens), a rare large-scale painting from the 1960s by Magsaysay-Ho, did not have a public valuation, but required bidders to request for estimates. Cheong’s tightly composed Satay Sellers (1958) was valued at between $320,000 and $480,000.

Both were bought in by the house at the close of Sotheby’s annual modern and contemporary art auction in Singapore, which had bidders from more than 20 countries. More than half of the bidders were from South-east Asia.

Another closely watched lot, White Orchids (Phalaenopsis, 1965) by Singapore pioneer artist Georgette Chen, went for an underwhelming price of $576,000, towards the lower end of its estimate range of $500,000 to $850,000.

The painting is from the artist’s most high-profile period – eight of the 10 top prices achieved for Chen were for works hailing from the 1960s – and was making its auction debut.

There had been high hopes. In 2023, Chen had broken her own record three times, and is currently holding the highest price for a pioneer artist from Singapore for her Still Life With Big Durian (circa 1965) sold by Christie’s for $2.47 million.

Ms Jasmine Prasetio, managing director of Sotheby’s South-east Asia section, said the auction house has received several inquiries for works by Magsaysay-Ho and Cheong since the weekend, and is confident that they will be part of a new collection soon.

Singapore remains among the top cities for Sotheby’s Asia transactions and is a vibrant market, she said. Some 20 per cent of buyers at the Sunday auction were new ones, the majority of whom are under the age of 40.

On the disappointing price for Chen’s orchids, Ms Prasetio offered some perspective. At just 33.4cm by 46.5cm, White Orchids (Phalaenopsis) is Chen’s most valuable work below 50cm at auction.

“A painting by the same artist was sold for US$838,784 (S$1.1 million) in Hong Kong recently, which is more than double the size of White Orchids (Phalaenopsis). If we look at the market for Nanyang artists as a whole, it has grown tremendously in the past decade,” she said.

Overall, 40 of the 47 lots on offer were successfully sold to private hands, with especially strong showings for Vietnamese artists such as Le Pho and Tran Van Ha.

Chinese painter Wu Guanzhong’s Field Chrysanthemums (1974), painted en plein air, or outdoors, and which came with a handwritten letter explaining the process of its creation, was the top lot, exceeding the $1.5 million top estimate to reach $2.5 million.

The artist recognised as the founder of modern Chinese painting is an art-market darling whose works have regularly hit the millions and tens of millions of dollars.

Though Cheong’s top lot was not sold at auction this time around, his two untitled 1963 abstract works matched and exceeded top estimates to transact at a combined $132,000.

Particularly fierce bidding – in the room, online and on the phone – was reserved for other Asian artists.

Tran’s double-sided wood panel folding screen of Women In A Garden and Procession Scene (1960s to 1970s) attracted a quick-fire bidding war online over five minutes, pushing it to $360,000, four times the $90,000 top valuation.

Japanese photographer Hiroshi Sugimoto’s Sea Of Okhotsk, Hokkaido (1989), also had 13 bids in just three minutes, and sold for $57,600, above the original estimate of between $25,000 and $45,000.

Though an easy metric for art observers to measure the strength and weakness of the auction season, comparing auction house estimates with their eventual hammer prices are, to a certain extent, unreliable.

Writing for Artsy.net, Pergamon Art Group founder Martin Gammon said in 2019 that these numbers depend more on auction house specialists’ negotiations with clients, usually set slightly above the minimum price they are willing to accept.

Lower estimates are likely to stimulate more bidders, although a more skittish client and his consignor will tend to push these up.

“Meeting, exceeding or falling short of estimates is hardly an indication of the strength of the underlying market unless this malleability is taken into account,” he said.