Phillips public sale home right now introduced additional particulars on the launch of its new Asia headquarters, located in Hong Kong’s West Kowloon Cultural District. The house will open with an exhibition of twentieth century- and up to date works by a variety of artists together with Yayoi Kusama, Matthew Wang and Loie Hollowell—nearly all of which will likely be provided on the market in its debut auctions on 30 and 31 March. The preview present, which runs from 18 March to five April, will embrace watches and jewelry and can overlap with Artwork Basel Hong Kong (25-25 March).
The 52,000 sq ft, six-floor new house is positioned reverse M+ museum and anchors the WKCDA Tower, which was designed by M+ architects Herzog & de Meuron. Its interiors are designed by LAAB architects and contains with the public sale room and exhibition galleries contains places of work, a café and a lounge.
“This 12 months, we’re celebrating our eighth 12 months of operations in Asia and are increasing our choices significantly,” Phillips’s chief government Stephen Brooks says in a press launch. The brand new facility “permits us to additional construct our enterprise within the area, transitioning from a restricted set of choices held twice yearly to a completely fledged sale calendar all year long. Phillips now enters a brand new period within the area as the primary worldwide public sale home to determine a purpose-built salesroom and gallery house”.
Phillips’s reported world gross sales of $746m within the first half of 2022—almost 40% of which got here from Asia. The corporate has been increasing its regional group, and now counts greater than 20 specialists in twentieth century- and up to date artwork. Final 12 months, the corporate introduced the addition of Minhee Suh as their regional consultant in South Korea, whereas Lihua Tong and Yvonne Fong joined because the regional roster of specialists. Tong was beforehand a Hong Kong director at David Zwirner gallery, whereas Fong joined from Simon Lee’s Hong Kong gallery, and had beforehand labored for Christie’s and Gagosian.
The complete preview will function over 200 works from the Hong Kong and New York spring auctions, says a spokesperson, together with works by Pablo Picasso, Yoshitomo Nara, Ayako Rokkaku, Huang Yuxing, Chen Ke, Christina Quarles, and Rashid Johnson. The Kusuma works within the sale embrace a big acrylic Pumpkin portray (1995, estimated at $5.1m-$6.4m), consigned by Karen and Robert Duncan and being offered to boost funds for the Clarinda Carnegie Artwork Museum in Clarinda, Iowa. It joins one other Kusama acrylic on canvas, Infinity Dots (HTI), (2001), which is estimated between $3.2m and $3.8m.
