15 Modern and Contemporary Artists on Our Radar From The Hong Kong Sales

Headlining this season’s Modern and Contemporary Evening Auction is Yoshitomo Nara’s Can't Wait 'til the Night Comes (2012), which was included in his critically acclaimed retrospective at the Los Angeles County Museum of Art in 2021. Can't Wait 'til the Night Comes debuted at Nara’s first major museum solo show in 2012, “a bit like you and me…”at Yokohama Museum of Art in Japan, where it was the exhibition’s poster image, before travelling to Aomori Museum of Art and then the Contemporary Art Museum in Kumamoto. Although Nara remarked upon a change in the meaning of his works around this time, no longer representing self-portraits but instead universal portraits of the human psyche, Nara’s little vampire is a tongue-in-cheek reference to the artist’s own nocturnal work habits. Can't Wait 'til the Night Comes took a year to complete and originally began life as a composition of a child holding a sprout before evolving through umpteen meticulous layers of underpainting to become Nara’s heterochromic fanged little protagonist. It is also the largest known work of Nara’s nocturnes featuring his children of the night, and the largest featuring a vampire to have come to auction to date.

Sprout the Ambassador (2001) belongs to the very first batch of iconic Ambassador paintings that Nara created in the early 2000s. With his little messenger carrying hope in his hands, a tiny seedling that will one day provide sustenance to generations of humans and animals, Nara made this as his painterly response to his visit to Auschwitz the previous year. “I’m simply an individual who believes that any war should be avoided,” he stated. Shortly after his return to Japan after 12 years in Germany, Nara began creating works on concave discs overlaid with cotton patchwork squares. He cited the influence of the pre-Renaissance Italian painter Giotto, who painted his frescoes wet-on-wet, patch by patch on freshly plastered walls, and who also utilised the tondo form in his other works. “These ones which are rendered on patchwork cotton are much more painterly, with many layers of colour,” Nara explained. Only six acrylic on FRP-mounted cotton tondo works exist featuring Nara’s adorable ambassador holding a tiny green sprout, with this particular iteration being the only one measuring well under one metre in diameter.

Rhythmic, undulating webs of luminous white acrylic lines sinuously weave their way across the inky black ground of Yayoi Kusama’s Infinity Nets (OQ4) (2000). Also from the Infinity Nets series, the mesmerising black-on-buttercup yellow Oil No. 19 (1997) brings together perhaps the most sought-after colour combination in Kusama's market, and is unusual in two aspects: its rare mid-size format and its use of oil paint rather than the more common acrylic, lending a tactile glossy sheen to the canvas surface.

Achieving self-obliteration through compulsive repetition forms the backbone of Kusama’s entire practice, from polka dots (which first appeared in Kusama’s childhood drawings) to their inverse – infinity nets, which began after she moved to New York as a young woman in 1958. Amidst fluctuating feelings of reality and unreality, Kusama continues to exorcise her fears through ritualistic creation. Kusama was the top-selling contemporary artist of 2023, and 2025 will see the opening of a major retrospective at the Fondation Beyeler in Basel, followed by stops at the Museum Ludwig in Cologne and the Stedelijk Museum in Amsterdam.

Another rare gem from this season is Louise Bourgeois’ massive work on paper À Baudelaire (#5) (2008), one of the largest to be offered to date and one of only five paper works over 120 cm in height by the artist to have ever come to auction. Bourgeois dedicated her work to the famed 19th-century French poet and critic Charles Baudelaire, whose controversial work Les fleurs du mal saw him prosecuted for outraging public decency with his poetic meditations on eroticism, decadence and original sin. The anthropomorphic forms reminiscent of female anatomy allude to Bourgeois’ lifelong inquiry into female desire, sexuality and motherhood, and as she approached the end of her life, she became enamoured with drawing and printmaking, culminating in a burst of experimentation that produced masterpieces on paper such as À Baudelaire (#5). There are 14 unique variants from the same series of etchings, with one in the permanent collection of the Museum of Modern Art in New York. The past couple of years have seen major surveys of Bourgeois’ work mounted at the Mori Art Museum in Tokyo, the Fubon Art Museum in Taipei, Hauser & Wirth Hong Kong as well as a display at the Courtauld Gallery in London dedicated to drawings by Bourgeois from the 1960s.

Wayne Thiebaud’s luscious still life paintings of fruit platters, cakes and pastries offer up a nostalgic slice of mid-century domestic Americana. Cantaloupe (1962) was formerly in the collection of the Museum of Modern Art in New York, donated by the renowned art historian and collector James Thrall Soby who had acquired it at Thiebaud’s very first show at Allan Stone Gallery in 1962. This show sold out, garnering critical and commercial acclaim for Thiebaud and putting him firmly on the contemporary artistic map. The glistening peaks and valleys of Canteloupe’s ridged rind border a perfectly ripened fleshy orange-hued pulp. Bathed in soft light, its corners appearing to quiver slightly upon further examination in a strange phenomenon which Thiebaud termed “the stare.” Closely associated with the later Pop art movement which observed and challenged the tropes of popular culture, Thiebaud’s work illustrates a new American iconography, one which reflects the prosperous new era of mass consumption whilst maintaining an ever-critical eye upon it.

One of this season’s Chinese contemporary highlights is Liu Ye’s Xiao Hong and Plum Blossom (2003). With his love of wonder and mystery, Liu’s work draws his audience into a world liberated from the quotidian. Liu's father was a famous children’s playwright and, at a time when many Western books were banned in China, his parents kept a stash of Western story books in a large black chest under his bed, which included the works of Hans Christian Andersen and Tolstoy. The enigmatic smile of Xiao Hong in her carmine red headscarf standing below gently falling plum blossoms evokes the childhood fairy tale of Little Red Riding Hood as much as the intimate, richly atmospheric portraits of the great Dutch Golden Age painter Johannes Vermeer, whose works Liu encountered during his studies in Berlin and residency at the Rijksakademie in Amsterdam. Work by Liu resides in numerous prominent public collections, including the Long Museum in Shanghai and M+ in Hong Kong.

Also coming of age during a period of acute political upheaval in China, Zhang Xiaogang’s enquiry into the essence of Chinese identity famously culminated in the surreal monochromatic tableaux of the Bloodline series, which resembled the beautified studio portraits of everyday Chinese people in the late Qing and early Republican period. “On the surface the faces in these portraits appear as calm as still water, but underneath there is great emotional turbulence. Within this state of conflict, the propagation of obscure and ambiguous destinies is carried on from generation to generation,” explained Zhang. His portrait of young sisters, Bloodline - Big Family No. 7: Siblings (1996), was painted amidst a milestone year for the artist. Swept up in a wave of international interest in contemporary Chinese art, Zhang’s iconic Bloodline series was included in “China! New Art & Artists” at the Kunstmuseum Bonn in Germany and the Second Asia-Pacific Triennial of Contemporary Art at the Queensland Art Gallery | Gallery of Modern Art in Australia in 1996 alone.

Into the Night (2019) by the late Chinese-Canadian self-taught artist Matthew Wong is a delicate nocturne from the artist’s most sought-after series, Blue. Between expressive ultramarine brushstrokes is a palpable sense of vulnerability and authenticity that has captivated audiences around the world and garnered Wong comparisons with the likes of Vincent van Gogh and Edvard Munch. Fresh to auction, Into the Night was included in Wong’s debut institutional exhibition, “The Blue View” at the Art Gallery of Ontario in 2021, which brought together more than 40 paintings from the Blue series executed between 2017 and the artist’s death in 2019. Dubbed “one of the most talented painters of his generation” by The New York Times, Wong’s work rarely appears at auction. Into the Night is the first to be offered at auction in 2025, whilst 2024 saw only six of Wong’s works go under the hammer.

Fizzing, whirling forms collide in an acid-tinged dreamscape in Li Hei Di’s There Was One Summer Returning Over and Over; There Was One Dawn I Grew Old Watching (2023), the second largest work by the artist to come to auction. Named after a line in a poem, Aubade, by American Nobel prize winner Louise Glück, Li’s meteoric rise through the international contemporary art scene is exemplified by her ability to reach across both Chinese and Western artistic traditions to speak truth to universal themes of being, desire and transformation. This work was presented at Li’s first solo exhibition at Michael Kohn Gallery in Los Angeles, “Oscillating Womb”, which ran from November 2023 to January 2024. The Los Angeles County Museum of Art acquired another of Li's paintings – Unquenchable Laughter, Inescapable Desert (2023) – for their own collection at this same show.

British grime star Stormzy caused a sensation when he performed onstage at Glastonbury festival in 2019 wearing Banksy’s Vest (2019), a stab-proof vest emblazoned with a filthy spray-painted Union Jack. Behind him flashed the words “knife crime” on video screens, alongside excerpts from a speech by British MP David Lammy on racial injustice in the criminal justice system. One of an edition of five, Banksy’s Vest (2019) was nominated for the 2020 Beazley Design of the Year prize and was donated to London’s Design Museum by Stormzy. Once an outsider best known for his stenciled street art interventions, today Banksy is firmly considered a cultural icon and advocate for social justice whose works deftly skewer structural racism and injustice with absurdist satire and unerring verve.

Pablo Picasso’s swashbuckling musketeer in Buste d’homme (1969) first emerged as a motif after Picasso re-read Alexandre Dumas’s 1844 adventure classic Three Musketeers in the mid-1960s. Enthroned and clad in a blood-red doublet and mustard-yellow silk garments reminiscent of the Spanish flag, Picasso’s rakish hero is an unmistakable proxy for the artist himself. By then in his late 80s but thoroughly undimmed by age, 1969 was one of Picasso’s most prolific years, with an entire volume of the Christian Zervos catalogue raisonné dedicated to it. Paying tribute to Old Masters such as Velázquez and Rembrandt, Picasso simultaneously began experimenting with corrugated cardboard and went on to create 39 bold and gestural portraits of mostly musketeers that now reside in prestigious institutional collections such as the Israel Museum, Musée Zervos, Museu Picasso and Fundación Almine y Bernard Ruiz-Picasso. His work from 1969 to 1970 was celebrated with a major exhibition at the Palais des Papes in Avignon in 1970. A similar example from the same series, Tête d'homme à la pipe (1969), sold at Sotheby's New York in 2017 for USD 4.4 million (HKD 34.3 million).

Flowers proliferated in Marc Chagall’s work as love bloomed in his life. Firstly, his love for his first wife and lifelong muse Bella Rosenfeld, whom the artist met in the summer of 1909. He painted the colourful bouquets that she gave him, joyous markers of the couple’s mutual devotion. Secondly, love for his adopted homeland of France, to which he returned in the autumn of 1947 after the devastation wrought by World War II had come to an end, claiming Bella’s life in the process. The abundance and variety of flowers in France, Chagall noted, “was a source of wonder and fascination for me.” He found refuge in them, studied them, marveled at how they had “helped develop the palette of the best French artists,” in particular the Impressionists. For Chagall, Les fleurs de l'amour ou Les iris (1948) is a heartfelt meditation on the nature of love and life. Such flowers were not only symbols of abiding love that illuminated the darkest nights, but they were also the blooming irises that grew in the fields of the fallen, reminders of the necessary suffering and sacrifice that accompanied great love.

Coming to auction for the first time, Zao Wou-Ki’s 12.02.2004 - Vague rouge blanc bleu (2004) was acquired directly from the artist's estate by its current owner. With a title that translates as “red, white and blue wave,”12.02.2004 is a sublime example of the Chinese-French modernist’s acclaimed Infinity Period, and was painted in the year between his election to the French Academy of Fine Arts and a major retrospective at the Galerie nationale du Jeu de Paume in Paris. Gone was the agitated turmoil of Zao’s earlier abstractions; instead, a transcendental, expansive energy filled his canvases with boundless colour and light. Wash-like layers of fiery orange and vivid pink combine Western oil painting and traditional Chinese ink techniques, a trademark method honed by the artist over almost five decades. 10.04.2006, a smaller work which shares a strikingly similar palette to the present work, fetched over HKD 13 million at auction in November 2024.

Lalan was an accomplished musician, composer and dancer before she turned her hand to painting after leaving her first husband, Zao Wou-Ki. Symbols and forms inspired by childhood Chinese calligraphy lessons vibrated with deeply-felt rhythms and the spontaneous spirit of French Art Informel in works such as The Earth is Far Away (1966). Swirling magenta skies are grounded by the ultramarine blue earth below, a hypnotic interplay of yin and yang. A master of auditory, tactile and bodily sensations on canvas, Lalan’s work meditates on the spirit and beauty of nature, combining ultra-fine lines with dappled clusters that mimic modern dance movements and the pulsating staccato of electronic music, all rooted in the flowing energy of Chinese qigong. Lalan only created 60 oil paintings between 1957 and 1969, with two from the 1960s now forming part of the permanent collection of the Musée d’Art Moderne de Paris.

Mai Trung Thu’s La calligraphie (1964) is a nostalgic vignette of the Vietnamese artist’s childhood in Hanoi. Eight small children gather around a calligraphic scroll as one of their number takes his turn with the brush. The horizontal format is itself reminiscent of a Chinese painting scroll: from left to right one child orders another to watch, another dutifully grinds the ink in a small bowl, a third attempts to catch the attention of his neighbour, whilst a fourth gazes sweetly into space. Painted after the artist’s move to Paris in 1937, La calligraphie celebrates the charming innocence of a bygone past. Mai was one of the stars of the first generation of Vietnamese painters who had studied at the l'École des Beaux-Arts de l'Indochine, Hanoi’s first art school. 2025 was a landmark year for the artist, who featured prominently in two blockbuster institutional shows: “Lê Phô, Mai-Thu, Vu Cao Dam: Pioneers of modern Vietnamese art in France” at the Cernuschi Museum in Paris and “City of Others: Asian Artists in Paris 1920s-1940s” at the National Gallery Singapore.

Lee Man Fong’s Laut dengan deburan ombaknya (1960) is a rare and remarkable work from the Chinese-Indonesian artist’s oeuvre. Foaming ocean waves crash on the sandy rocks, surrounded by ink black mountains shrouded in translucent mist. Devoid of Lee’s usual depictions of Balinese locals and animals, Laut dengan deburan ombaknya is instead a private homage to the Balinese landscape that had become Lee’s adopted home for years. A Chinese immigrant originally from Guangzhou, Lee’s family moved to Singapore before eventually settling in Jakarta. His mature style fused Western, Chinese and Indonesian traditions, and he became known as one of the greatest pioneers of Southeast Asian art.