15 Defining Artworks From Hong Kong’s Modern & Contemporary Evening Auction

A head of the Modern & Contemporary Evening Auction on 29 March, we present a closer look at 15 highlights spanning painting, sculpture and mixed media. Their visions live in light and shadow, projecting diverse atmospheres of calm contemplation, mystery and myth, or warm, sunlit ritual.

Cézanne is revered as the "father of modern art," the artist whose practice fundamentally bridged the artistic traditions of the nineteenth century and the modern movements of the twentieth. He abandoned the Impressionist pursuit of fleeting light and atmosphere, choosing instead to explore the underlying structure and geometric order inherent in nature.

In Rochers (circa 1867-70), Cézanne appears particularly moved by the specific site—its dramatically weathered stone and luxuriant foliage—prompting both an oil version and a watercolor study of the same composition. The present work remains one of the largest scales among Cézanne early Rock paintings.

Created as the Second World War entered its closing chapter, Natura morta (1942-43) was executed in Morandi’s studio in Grizzana, on the outskirts of Bologna. Morandi celebrates “humble objects” (umili soggetti), coaxing them into stable, structured and attractive geometry. As fellow Italian 21st-century painter Renato Birolli observed in his diary, Morandi’s arrangement of objects demonstrated “an astonishing sense of distribution.” Instantly recognisable through the low‑saturation “Morandi palette” of sober, earthy tones, paired with meticulous composition, Morandi’s Natura morta presents simple cups as refuges of calm contemplation, showing how he deeply influenced subsequent Minimalism and Conceptual Art.

The Modern & Contemporary Evening Auction presents two paintings by pioneering Chinese-French painter Zao Wou-Ki.

Vivid, fiery reds blaze in Terre rouge – 16.01.2005 (2005). In 2008, the French magazine Vernissages featured an interview with the renowned artist in its inaugural issue, marking his 60 years of artistic achievement. The cover showcases a smiling and relaxed Zao with Terre rouge – 16.01.2005 prominently displayed, reflecting importance of this painting within his oeuvre. The painting is also featured in José Frèches’s Zao Wou-Ki - Oeuvres, écrits, entretiens, a compilation of significant writings and artworks, as well as in the monograph Zao Wou-Ki 1935 – 2008, emphasising its significance within his body of work.

A far earlier counterpoint, Nuage (1956), is a masterpiece of tactility, daubed crimson quasi-calligraphy on rock, a journey in which language is afforded temporary refuge on mineral contours. The work presages his incoming “Hurricane Period” by the end of the 1950s, and is a mature and representative example of his “Oracle Bone” period.

Zenzaburo Kojima, a pioneer of Japanese modern art, was born in Fukuoka in 1893, before moving to Tokyo 20 years later to pursue his dream of becoming a painter. Nude (1928-29) is a rarity, as Kojima is believed to have only created about 50 nude paintings throughout his life, of which less than 20 are nude figures in a standing pose. Lacking identifiable features in the background, Kojima’s figure is t.mes less, relatable and fresh, inviting our own imagination and projections.

Portrait de jeune femme (1931) by Léonard Tsuguharu Foujita radiates unstudied elegance, youth and insouciant, and is typical of his work from the 1930s. Foujita was a celebrated fixture in the Parisian arts scene in the 1920s before his return to Japan. In 1950, with Japan greatly changed by the legacy of the Second World War, Foujita returned to France. Women combings their hair was a recurrent motif of European Impressionist painting and of Japanese ukiyo-e prints, and the artist’s own oscillation between Japanese and European culture finds a stable anchor in this universally understood subject.

Educated at the Royal Academy of Replica Handbags s in Brussels, Le Mayeur arrived in Bali in 1932. His subsequent paintings affectionately captured the sunlit elegance of the island, its warmth, rituals, dancing and cultural history. He lived in a traditional Balinese style home on Sanur Beach, and Two women in Balinese interior is a rare insight into this domestic life. The rich wood is lit by flickers of light from a yellow flower and a green tablecloth, making for a painting which beckons us into the cosy, half-light through friendly illumination.

Among the greatest living contemporary artists, Japanese superstar Yayoi Kusama continues to dazzle us with her creative output. The Modern & Contemporary Evening Auction includes two prime examples of her renowned pumpkin muse, one sculpture and one painting.

Standing more than two metres high, Pumpkin (2015) is a voluptuous sculpture of heft, abundance and contemplative meditation, executed in urethane paint on fiberglass reinforced plastic. Kusama’s deep bond with the pumpkin is rooted in childhood visits to her family’s seed nursery, and grew during an early artist residency in Kyoto, where she developed a meditative practice of painting them. Bold and beloved worldwide, the spotted gourds impart optimism, calm, and joy, as well as spiritual balance.

Painted 17 years earlier in 1998, Pumpkin was created during a decisive phase in Kusama’s career. Although the artist had admitted herself to a psychiatric hospital the previous year, she continued to produce work prolifically. In the same year as this painting’s execution, the retrospective Love Forever: Yayoi Kusama, 1958–1968 opened and toured major venues from LACMA to New York’s MoMA, as well as the Walker Art Center in Minneapolis and the Museum of Contemporary Art in Tokyo. The coiling vine is an exceptionally rare variation of her signature motif. This remains the only canvas with this distinctive vine form to have appeared at auction to date.

Miami-based artist Hernan Bas’ paintings are rich in symbolism, atmosphere, ambiguity and possibility. Stumped depicts a solitary man pausing in a forest, surrounded by vegetation and pathways yet untaken, embedded in an atmosphere which seems part film-set, part surreal, fantastical dystopia. Collar up, eyes downcast, “pale and spectre-thin,” the hesitating figure seems as fleeting as impermanent as the mists and water which swirl around him. The haunting atmosphere evokes the emotive vistas of 19th-century Romanticism, calling to mind artists such as Caspar David Friedrich — whose Wanderer above the Sea of Fog likewise hints at a fragile balance between nature and the self.

Duan Jianyu’s chickens offer satirical and ironic commentary on art while highlighting the tensions between urban and rural life. Created in 2003, Duan’s Artistic Chicken No. 5 (2003) is part of her iconic series from the 2000s. That same year, Duan was invited to participate in the Venice Biennale, where she showcased a 100-piece sculptural installation titled Artistic Chicken. Of the 100 works involved in the installation, 40 are now held in Hong Kong’s M+ Museum.

In this painting, the Henan-born graduate of the Guangzhou Academy of Replica Handbags s cloaks her own unique satirical style in Edouard Manet’s celebrated Le Déjeuner sur l’herbe, adding her own insight to the objectification of the female form in art history.

Rhee Seundja was a pioneering figure in Korean abstract art, alongside peers including Kim Whanki and Park Sookeun. In 1951, she left her war-torn homeland to study in France, at the Académie de la Grande Chaumière. As she described it, “In the depth of the ocean, I have arrived in Paris in peace… I am going to be reborn, reborn on foreign soil.” Deriving from her “Woman and Earth period” (1958–1968), Rhee’s fiery Untitled (1961), a decade on from her move to France, is reminiscent of stitching and tilling, of care, custody and promulgation. Her role as a mother of three sons and her longing for Korea are considered driving forces of her creativity in this period.

At over two metres tall, New York-born Lucy Bull’s 22:14 (2022) is a symphony of multi-layered abstraction. The artist blends precision and impulse in painterly constructions of anything between four and twenty layers. Her highly textured artworks are forensic and archaeological, demanding yet frustrating close examination. As she said in an interview with Bomb in 2021, “t.mes is everything. I feel like a lot of the paintings function with a t.mes d release. The layers start to shift and unravel, and the more you look, the more you start to see.”

Pennsylvania-born street artist and activist Keith Haring created motifs and designs which remain iconic four decades on. His freely drawn radiant babies, barking dogs, pyramids, crosses, hearts, UFOs and phallic dancers continue to immerse us now in the issues which mattered so much to him then. In Untitled, a baked enamel and metal work from 1982, the burst of energy which propelled him from New York City’s grungy underground subway billboards into the public consciousness comes to rest in a clean-lined manifestation of acceptance, fellowship and community.

One of the most instantly recognisable manifestations of Chinese contemporary art, Zeng Fanzhi’s era defining Mask Series launched the artist onto the global stage, and became synonymous with the modern, urban Chinese aesthetic.

Zeng’s renowned Mask Series powerfully expresses both the personal and universal anxieties related to the urban experience, using the mask motif to emphasize the dramatic tension between outward appearances and inner emotions. Created in 1994, Mask Series: No. 21 is a rare, mature work from the iconic series, while still being stylistically connected to his previous Meat and Hospital series.

Upcoming Auction

Modern & Contemporary Evening Auction

29 March 2026 | 6:00 PM HKT | Hong Kong