The first of these milestone events occurred on March 27, when Christie\u2019s 20th\/21st Century Evening Sale was 100 per cent sold. The auction was led by Gerhard Richter\u2019s HK$92.1 million (US$11.8 million) Abstraktes Bild<\/em> and achieved a total of HK$655.8 million in sales.<\/p>\n Two days later, on March 29, Sotheby\u2019s followed with its own \u201cwhite glove\u201d evening auction. It brought in HK$548.4 million after Joan Mitchell\u2019s La Grande Vall\u00e9e VII<\/em> fetched HK$137.3 million to become the most valuable work by a female artist sold at auction in Asia.<\/p>\n Remarkably, the underbidder \u2013 the one who did not win the work but helped push up the final price \u2013 was a collector in their twenties. Meanwhile, Phillips\u2019 evening sale, also on March 29, recorded a far-from-shabby 93 per cent sell-through rate.<\/p>\n What those impressive figures mean about the Asian art market is inconclusive. As art adviser Josh Baer points out in his newsletter, the Richter and the Mitchell could well have been bought by collectors outside Asia. Non-Asian buyers and bidders represented nearly 70 per cent of the bids at Sotheby\u2019s, the auction house says.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n![\"Joan](\"https:\/\/img.i-scmp.com\/cdn-cgi\/image\/fit=contain,width=1024,format=auto\/sites\/default\/files\/d8\/images\/canvas\/2026\/04\/07\/b643d884-2119-4337-9e6e-f2e5be0a588d_ebdb8d08.jpg\" "\\"Joan")
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