In a market dominated by auction houses that have been in business for centuries, Poly Auction Hong Kong has made quite a splash since it was founded ten years ago. Beijing Poly International Auction, which is a subsidiary of the Poly Culture Group, is today the largest auction house in China, with the highest auction transaction volume of Chinese art globally.
Poly’s influence extends far beyond China and Hong Kong, too, and in the past few years, the house has collaborated on successful co-auctions with Philips. It has found remarkable success by introducing Asian collectors to Western contemporary artists, as well as the reverse. Even amid the financial and business tumult of recent years, Poly Auction Hong Kong concluded 2021 with an impressive HK$2.6 billion in sales.
To celebrate its 10-year anniversary, Poly Auctions is hosting a week of high-profile auctions including both Modern and contemporary evening and day
sales (July 12 and 13, respectively), with a number of covetable works by trending artists.
Ahead of the auctions, we’ve handpicked five works heading to Poly Auction’s Modern and contemporary art evening sale that we don’t think you should miss. Check out our picks below.
With his progressive vision, Xie Nanxing has become one of the most significant Chinese artists in the contemporary field. Born in Chongqing in 1970, the artist first came to wider attention at the 48th Venice Biennale in 1999, where he showed a series of distinctive portraits. The First Round With a Whip No.2 (The Wave No.2), created in 2008, marks a clear departure from his works from the 1990s and early 2000s.
The painting is part of a series consisting of three works—titled No.1, No.2, and No.3 respectively—that were shown in his solo exhibition “BIG SHOW” at the Galerie Urs Meile in Beijing the same year they were painted. In these works, the artist intended to explore the idea of the “Freudian slip,” an unintentional verbal or physical manifestation of subconscious feelings, as coined by famed psychologist Sigmund Freud.
The works are meant to play a visual game of concealing and revealing meaning—both from the viewers and the artist himself. In The First Round With a Whip No.2 (The Wave No.2), a group of children are faintly depicted with their elongated figures shrouded in a blue halo. The mysterious image immerses us in a long, dizzying game of looking.
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