As collectors gather in Hong Kong for Art Week, the city's major auction houses are rolling out back-to-back modern and contemporary art sales over the weekend. On Saturday (28 Mar), Bonhams staged a single‑owner sale dedicated to works by Yayoi Kusama, with all six lots finding buyers.
Titled “More than Red,” the auction featured fresh‑to‑market works from a Japanese private collection, spanning paintings, sculpture, prints, and a small installation.
The star was a red Pumpkin painting from 2000, notable as the only large-scale work in this color to appear in this season's Hong Kong sales. It sold for HK$22.2 million (US$2.8 million) with fees to telephone bidder paddle 1001, represented by Cassi Young, Bonhams' Director of Modern & Contemporary Art based in Singapore.
Editor’s note: Bonhams Hong Kong’s selling exhibition “Hsiao Chin: Great Ego in Infinity,” featuring more than 20 works by the Chinese avant‑garde pioneer, runs through 9 April
Marcello Kwan | Head of Modern and Contemporary Art, Asia
Lot 3 | Yayoi Kusama (b. 1929) | Pumpkin, acrylic on canvas
Painted in 2000
60 x 72 cm
Provenance:
- Private Collection, Japan
Estimate: HK$15,000,000 - 25,000,000
Hammer Price: HK$18,000,000
Sold: HK$22,234,000 (US$2.8 million)
Compared with Kusama’s classic yellow‑and‑black palette, red pumpkin paintings are rarer on the market. Another example from 2000, larger than the present lot, sold for around HK$40.3 million at Christie’s Hong Kong in 2023.
When Kusama rose to prominence in the United States in the 1960s, she viewed colour as a direct manifestation of her inner world, shaped by childhood hallucinations and early experiences of self‑obliteration.
Red held particular significance as one of her most favoured colours. She traces this back to her first and most pivotal childhood hallucination: "One day, I was looking at the red flower patterns of the tablecloth on a table, and when I looked up I saw the same pattern covering the ceiling, the windows, and the walls, and finally all over the room, my body and the universe. I felt as if I had begun to self-obliterate."
This visual experience of patterns endlessly multiplying became a driving force behind her practice, later crystallising in her signature polka dots and net structures.
Pumpkin (2000) | 73 x 90.8 cm | Sold: HK$40,305,000, Christie's Hong Kong, 2023
Close-up of the present work
Close-up of the present work
The pumpkin is Kusama’s most recognisable motif and one of contemporary art’s most iconic images. Her attachment to it also goes back to childhood, on her family’s seed farm in central Japan, where she grew up surrounded by the forms and textures of agricultural life.
As a child living with severe hallucinations, one of her earliest memories centres on a pumpkin: "The first time I ever saw a pumpkin was when I was in elementary school and went with my grandfather to visit a big seed‑harvesting ground… there it was: a pumpkin the size of a man's head… It immediately began speaking to me in a most animated manner."
During World War II, she ate pumpkins almost daily to the point of nausea, yet came to see it as a familiar, comforting presence – full, bulbous and resilient, with a robust vitality that belied an unglamorous appearance. Over time, the pumpkin became both a spiritual symbol and an alter ego, appearing in her polka dot works as early as the 1940s and recurring throughout her career.
Lot 2 | Yayoi Kusama (b. 1929) | Pumpkin (8), acrylic on canvas
Painted in 1990
18.2 x 14.2 cm
Provenance:
- Private Collection, Japan
Estimate: HK$2,000,000 - 4,000,000
Hammer Price: HK$2,000,000
Sold: HK$2,544,000
The sale also included two other pumpkin works that trace the evolution of this beloved motif. A yellow‑and‑black pumpkin painting from 1990, measuring just 18.2 x 14.2 cm, marks a pivotal moment in Kusama’s career resurgence. After years of obscurity following her return to Japan in the mid‑1970s, her first international retrospective had just concluded in New York, signalling her return to the global stage.
During the 1980s, Kusama had begun exploring the pumpkin in three dimensions, experimenting with bronze, fiberglass, stainless steel, resin, and ceramic to see how the form would interact with light and space.
The sale's 1985 mixed-media sculpture belongs to this experimental phase. At just 10 cm in size, with hand‑painted polka dots and an irregular form, it offers an intimate version of the motif before Kusama scaled it up into the monumental public sculptures that helped cement her international fame.
Lot 1 | Yayoi Kusama (b. 1929) | Untitled, mixed media sculpture
Executed in 1990
10 x 10 x 9.4 cm
Provenance:
- Private Collection, Japan
Estimate: HK$600,000 - 900,000
Hammer Price: HK$600,000
Sold: HK$766,000
The remaining three lots were all limited‑edition works: two prints and one mirror box – a miniature version of her iconic mirror room – each signed by the artist.
Lot 4 | Yayoi Kusama (b. 1929) | Fireflies, screenprint
Executed in 2000
59.5 x 47.5 cm
Edition: 34/100
Provenance:
- Private Collection, Japan
Estimate: HK$80,000 - 130,000
Hammer Price: HK$180,000
Sold: HK$230,400
Lot 5 | Yayoi Kusama (b. 1929) | Nets B.O, screenprint
Executed in 1997
65 x 50.3 cm
Edition: 13/100
Provenance:
- Private Collection, Japan
Estimate: HK$80,000 - HK$130,000
Hammer Price: HK$80,000
Sold: HK$102,400
Lot 6 | Yayoi Kusama (b. 1929) | Mirror Box Type A, screenprinted box with mirror, plexi, metal balls and lenses
Executed in 2001
14.3 x 14.3 x 16.5 cm
Edition: 80/280
Provenance:
- Private Collection, Japan
Estimate: HK$20,000 - HK$40,000
Hammer Price: HK$65,000
Sold: HK$83,200
Auction Details:
Auction House: Bonhams Hong Kong
Sale: MORE THAN RED: A Single Owner Collection of Exceptional Works by Yayoi Kusama
Date: 28 March 2026
Number of Lots: 6
Sold: 6
Sale Rate: 100%
Sale Total: HK$25,960,000 (US$3.3 million)