Sotheby’s has seen tremendous growth and change since its early days as a posh London bookstore in the 1700s. It started small, auctioning rare and precious literary collectables, followed by prints, medals and coins. But things took off in the early 1900s when it decided to capitalise on fine art to rival its number one competitor, Christie’s.
Not long after, Sotheby’s opened offices in Paris and Los Angeles, and became the first auction house to operate in Hong Kong in 1973 and Moscow in 1988. Today, Sotheby’s operates in 40 countries and spans 70 categories, including classic and modern art, jewellery, watches, wine and spirits, design, collectable cars and real estate.
Once a publicly-listed company trading on the New York Stock Exchange, the auction house today is privately owned by majority shareholder French-Israeli businessman Patrick Drahi. Under his reign, Sotheby’s overtook Christie’s as the world’s top auction house in 2020 (for the first time since 2011), with over $5 billion in aggregate sales.
Part of its meteoric rise was the speed with which Sotheby’s pivoted virtually to create new mobile and web experiences and drive larger online sales. At the same time, Sotheby’s also launched an NFT (non-fungible token) peer-to-peer trading platform and a WeChat platform for the China market.
Innovation is the key to the company’s success. In addition to its auction business, it offers private sale opportunities, a BuyNow marketplace, Sotheby’s Financial Services, the world’s only full-service art financing company, and Sotheby’s Advisory.
“Compared to what I knew of Sotheby’s as a public company, the speed at which we can innovate, make decisions, and assure business opportunities, is like nothing I’ve ever experienced. Since becoming privatised, Sotheby’s has become much more innovative and experimental,” says Sotheby’s chairman of modern and contemporary art in Asia, Alex Branczik, who has been with the company since 2004.
As the first international auction house to enter Asia, Sotheby’s continues to harness its presence across the Asia Pacific region as the world’s gateway, offering exceptional international artworks and objects in response to the ever-increasing demand from a growing regional collector base. This year, Sotheby’s Hong Kong saw successful results in its Spring auction series, with Chinese art achieving its highest total for the category in nine years at US$209 million ($283.3 million), with 96% of the lots sold across its four sales.
To celebrate its 50th anniversary in Asia, Sotheby’s held its second art auction in Singapore in July, with 93% of lots sold from a global bidding of over 15 countries, with two-thirds coming from Southeast Asia. Over half of the lots offered achieved prices exceeding their high estimates drawing a total of $15.1 million. Comparatively, it does not amass as much as Hong Kong, but Branczik observes that auction bids for Southeast Asian art have been increasing seasonally.
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The closed-door event at Marina Bay Sands featured over 60 offerings by artists from the region and beyond, and included a grouping of fresh-to-market works by celebrated female artists such as Georgette Chen, Christine Ay Tjoe, Jane Lee, Kei Imazu and Yayoi Kusama. They stood alongside highly important masterpieces by pioneer modernists such as Liu Kang and Srihadi Soedarsono, and international masters Le Pho, Chu Teh-Chun, Wu Guanzhong and Fernando Botero.
While Georgette Chen’s Lychees and Peaches was sold to an in-room bidder for $2.02 million (surpassing the estimate of over $1.2 million), Liu Ye’s Composition with Moonlight also achieved well above its estimate of $1.7 million, and The Team of Red by Christine Ay Tjoe, one of the most acclaimed artists in Indonesia, closed at $990,600.
The spotlight on Asian artists exemplifies Sotheby’s commitment to nurturing dialogues about art in the community across Asia. During a panel talk at the Singapore auction, one hotly discussed topic was the downplaying of Asian art at international auctions. As a leading voice in the Asian art world, Branczik is especially invested and conscious of this issue, more so as a European face of an Asian art department based in Hong Kong.
“I’ve observed that over the last five years or so, our Asian collectors are increasingly following more global trends and leaning towards Western contemporary artists. Ten years ago, at our 40th-anniversary sale, the auction consisted entirely of Asian artists across the contemporary and modern categories,” says Branczik. “Fast forward 10 years to today, at our 50th-anniversary sale in Hong Kong, four of the top five lots sold were internationally-recognised blue-chip artists like Yoshitomo Nara, Matthew Wong, and Yayoi Kusama. The percentage makeup of the sale was very different, but it was still in favour of Western-popularised art.”
Sotheby’s is an auction house that reflects the market’s demand and functions as a secondary marketplace. It does not wield that much power to influence public perception. Branczik feels that for mindsets to change, they must occur at a grassroots level. “It is not within the power of one institution to turn a market. It is incumbent on all the many facets of the art ecosystem. That means everything from art schools to the primary market galleries, the auction houses, the museums, critics and art publications — we all need to work together to change the narrative collectively.”
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“I think it is true that there are fewer museums in Asia than in the West. The art ecosystem is less well-developed in many parts of Asia. And it’s also true that those museums in the West do not do as much to promote Asian art in the West, with a few notable exceptions like the Guggenheim Asian Art Initiative,” Branczik says.
“It’s dependent on all of us to shine a light on Asian art and to make sure that it’s not just Asian collectors collecting Western art, but also Western collectors collecting Asian art.”
On commemorating Sotheby’s 50th year in Asia, Branczik says the focus is laying the foundation for the next 50 years. “A key part of Sotheby’s success is that it is an innovative and forward-looking company. Sotheby’s Asia is 50 years new. The question is, what’s in store for the next 50 years? What we do today is done with that in mind, to ensure that we continue to be market leaders and pioneers in the field for the next 50 years,” he adds.
Next year’s opening of the Sotheby’s Maison in Chater House in Central Hong Kong is most significant. “This groundbreaking exhibition space will allow us to interact with our clientele 365 days a year. We will be able to have an auction calendar which is not dependent on two seasons but staggered throughout the year. This will allow us the opportunity to do much more than we can do today,” says Branczik.
In addition, Sotheby’s has opened a new office and headquarters in Shanghai with a series of localised experiences for collectors in Mainland China. It will also open a new office in Seoul later this year, reaffirming the company’s commitment to fostering the collecting scene in Asia.
Another of its core missions is to build local art and cultural ecosystems through strategic engagement around the region. Beyond commercial auctions, Sotheby’s conducts non-commercial exhibitions to engage, inform and inspire the art community. Just this month, it hosted its second non-selling exhibition in Ho Chi Minh City, which explored the lives and works of the French artists who travelled or lived in colonial Indochina, and how they constructed their visions of the land and its people. Carefully selected and curated into different sections, the exhibition provided an unparalleled scale and vision with masterpieces of an institutional level.
Branczik says: “We will continue to shine a light and focus on Asian artists. Inevitably, there will always be crossovers in the artists we sell, collected in this part of the world. But, it’s key for us to maintain our identity and differentiate ourselves from our flagships in New York and London.”
