Hong Kong’s art‑packed March may be over, but Poly Auction Hong Kong kept the city’s auction season ticking over on 6 April with its modern and contemporary art sale, where 46 of 69 lots found buyers, bringing the total to about HK$76.4 million (around US$9.8 million).
Three works crossed the HK$10 million mark. Leading the sale was You Like Pork? by Cynical Realism painter Liu Wei, first shown at the Venice Biennale in the year it was made, which sold for HK$27.6 million (US$3.5 million) with fees after a phone bid placed through art adviser Li Lanfang.
Zao Wou‑Ki’s canvas 15.07.67 from his acclaimed “Hurricane” period and Wu Dayu’s 1980s abstraction Rhymes of Beijing Opera followed at HK$12 million and HK$11.16 million respectively.
Auctioneer Jenny Lok brought the gavel down at HK$23 million
Lot 135 | Liu Wei (b. 1965) | You Like Pork?, oil on canvas
Painted in 1995
200 x 155 cm
Provenance (Consolidated by The Value):
- Hanart TZ Gallery, Hong Kong, China
- Important Private Asian Collection
- Sotheby's Hong Kong, 5 October 2014, Lot 1043 (Sold: HK$23,640,000)
- Acquired from the above sale by the present owner
Estimate on request
Hammer Price: HK$23,000,000
Sold: HK$27,600,000
In the turbulent Chinese art scene of the 1990s, Liu Wei emerged as one of the key figures in what later came to be called Cynical Realism. Rather than follow the widespread Political Pop movement, he carved out his own path and developed a distinct visual language within Chinese contemporary art.
Painted in 1995, at the height of China’s first market boom, You Like Pork? captures a moment when capital and consumer culture were rapidly expanding, older ideological frameworks were fading, and everyday life was increasingly saturated with temptation. Rather than illustrating that shift through slogans or icons, Liu lays bare the individual caught inside new systems of value and control.
That same year, the painting was selected for the thematic exhibition of the Venice Biennale – Liu’s second appearance there just six years after graduating from the Central Academy of Fine Arts – and its mix of raw shock and uneasy humour gave international audiences a sharply different lens on Chinese contemporary art.
At the time, Chinese contemporary art was starting to appear regularly in museum shows and biennials overseas, and Political Pop – with its mash‑ups of Mao imagery and Western consumer logos – was fast becoming the export face of the scene. While many of his contemporaries leaned on historical trauma or recognisable cultural symbols, Liu turned instead to the everyday mechanics of desire and consumption.
Liu Wei
Close-up of the present lot
Close-up of the present lot
The canvas builds a kind of sensory ruin. At its centre stands a nude woman, surrounded by carefully segmented chunks of meat stacked like bricks. Facing the viewer, she sticks out her tongue in a taunting, almost comic gesture, her body fully exposed.
Her eyes, however, are obliterated by thick swipes of paint, as if the mutual act of seeing and being seen has been cut off. She reads less as a person than as an object, disciplined by some larger, unseen will. Around her head sprout crude phallic forms and milky drips, scribbling base sexual drives – and perhaps a dark joke about “progress” – across the surface.
Look closer and the scene is grounded in the grubby texture of everyday life: cigarette butts, flies and stains puncture any sense of allegorical distance. The brick‑like slabs of flesh begin to resemble film stills or data strips recording the desires of an era.
The repeated phrase “YOU LIKE PORK” lands like a flat, mechanical question, while scattered number strings such as “543183” and “034321” recall product codes or archival catalogues. Desire is quantified and packaged; the body is priced and itemised like meat in a market stall. The individual is reduced to a unit – statistical, tradable, consumable – within the machinery of the new economy.
Auctioneer Shally Lin brought the gavel down at HK$10 million
Lot 146 | Zao Wou-ki (1920-2013) | 15.07.67, oil on canvas
Painted in 1967
114 x 146 cm
Provenance:
- Galerie de France, Paris, France
- Private Collection, Switzerland
- Private Collection, Switzerland (acquired from the above by the present owner)
Estimate: HK$8,600,000 - 15,000,000
Hammer Price: HK$10,000,000
Sold: HK$12,000,000
One of the most important figures in the Asian art market, Zao Wou‑Ki was a trailblazer in merging Eastern heritage with Western modernism. He was among the few Chinese painters to gain international recognition during his lifetime, with strong demand for his work in Europe and the United States from the 1950s onward – just a few years after he left China for Paris.
Painted on 15 July 1967, 15.07.67 belongs to the most critically and commercially prized stretch of Zao’s career, his so‑called “Hurricane Period” from roughly 1959 to 1972. In these years he moved away from the ideogram‑like “signs” of his earlier work toward spacious, layered fields in which light and density create depth without relying on horizons or identifiable motifs.
Drawing on Song‑dynasty painters such as Mi Fu, he translated their use of voids into oil, constructing the ostensibly “empty” areas rather than leaving them blank. Because oil cannot be washed like ink, he worked these passages carefully to keep them light while still giving them weight.
Mi Fu | Spring Mountains and Auspicious Pines (Song dynasty) | Collection of Taipei Palace Museum
Close-up of the present lot
In 15.07.67, a pale, vaporous ground is keyed by a concentrated dark core, and the whole composition seems to breathe through thin, translucent layers of paint handled almost like ink. The surrounding field is built up as a pearly expanse of off‑whites and greys, threaded with faint ochre and a cool neutral undertone, held open by diluted glazes.
Here, Zao translates the near‑invisible “clouds and waters” between heaven and earth in Song‑dynasty landscape into an abstract current within modern oil. His white space is not mere emptiness but a site where breath seems to bend, circulate and briefly come to rest.
The choreography of the brush – accelerations across broad wipes, small runs, soft diffusions – gathers toward a radiant centre, turning the canvas into a contemporary enactment of the spirit that underpinned the landscapes he admired.
Lot 145 | Wu Dayu (1903-1988) | Rhymes of Beijing Opera, oil on canvas, laid on cardboard
Painted in the 1980s
53 x 38 cm
Provenance:
- Sotheby's Hong Kong, 7 April 2007, Lot 17
- Acquired from the above sale by the present owner
Estimate: HK$8,000,000 - 12,000,000
Hammer Price: HK$9,300,000
Sold: HK$11,160,000
“Human art is interconnected; there is no need to divide it into East or West. Art is a language – there are differences only of era, not of region.”
For Wu Dayu, this was both an artistic credo and a historical claim. Modernity, as he saw it, meant that art no longer belonged to a specific place but to the spirit of its time. From this standpoint he developed the concept of Shixiang (the study of force‑form), a theoretical framework that helped shape modern Chinese abstract art.
Shixiang is not just a formal device but a way of thinking about movement. It is less concerned with depicting forms than with generating force through forms in motion. The idea grows out of the spirit of Chinese calligraphy and landscape painting—the flow of the brush, the continuity of vital breath, and the sense that form crystallises out of moving energy.
Close-up of the present lot
In Rhymes of Beijing Opera, Wu channels the rhythm, light, shadow and bodily movement of the Peking opera stage into a fully abstract language. Individual figures dissolve into layered pulses of colour and line. Bold reds and blues sweep across the canvas like stage lights cutting through darkness. Swift white strokes race across the surface, turning kinetic motion into visual tempo.
The composition develops as a swirling structure: interlocking colour blocks cluster toward the centre, compressing energy before releasing it in bursts of tension. In the lower left, dry, rapid brushstrokes flicker like sparks, driving the eye upward. Space breaks into multiple layers, and the painting’s visual vibration echoes the emotional swell of a symphonic movement.
Other Highlight Lots:
Lot 147 | Wu Guanzhong (1919-2010) | The Qianling Mountains, oil on board
Painted in 1972
46 x 46 cm
Provenance:
- Important Private Asian Collection
- Sotheby’s Hong Kong, 5 October 2014, Lot 1008
- Acquired from the above sale by the present owner
Estimate: HK$6,500,000 - 10,000,000
Hammer Price: HK$7,950,000
Sold: HK$9,540,000
Lot 112 | Kohei Nawa (b. 1975) | PixCell-Pelican, mixed media sculpture
Executed in 2019
47 x 83.5 x 91 cm
Provenance:
- Arario Gallery, Seoul, South Korea
- Acquired from the above by the present owner
Estimate: HK$1,500,000 - 2,500,000
Hammer Price: HK$1,700,000
Sold: HK$2,040,000
Lot 160 | Li Chaoshi (1893-1971) | Watermelon, pastel on paper
Executed in 1960
65.8 x 43.8 cm
Estimate: HK$1,500,000 - 3,000,000
Hammer Price: HK$1,550,000
Sold: HK$1,860,000
Lot 109 | Yoshitomo Nara (b. 1959) | Fucking No. 1, marker pen and coloured pencil on paper
Executed in 1995
39.9 x 29.8 cm
Provenance:
- Private Collection, Nagoya, Japan
- Christie's Hong Kong 23 November 2014, Lot 559
- Private Collection, Asia
- Acquired from the above by the present owner
Estimate: HK$1,000,000 - 2,000,000
Hammer Price: HK$1,400,000
Sold: HK$1,680,000
Lot 158 | Zhang Shaoxia (b. 1953) | Ultimate Test of Golf (Pine Valley Golf Club), oil on canvas
Painted in 2021
65 x 120 cm
Provenance:
- Private Collection, Asia
Estimate: HK$700,000 - 1,000,000
Hammer Price: HK$1,400,000
Sold: HK$1,680,000
Lot 155 | Ju Ming (1938-2023) | Taichi Series - Pair, two copper sculptures
Executed in 2000
Edition: 3/8
76.5 x 93.1 x 79.2 cm; 68.6 x 64 x 75.3 cm
Estimate: HK$1,500,000 - 2,500,000
Hammer Price: HK$1,200,000
Sold: HK$1,440,000
Lot 136 | Zhang Enli (b. 1965) | Apartment, oil on canvas
Painted in 2007
150 x 180 cm
Provenance:
- ShanghART Gallery, Shanghai, China
- Acquired from the above by the present owner
Estimate: HK$1,000,000 - 1,500,000
Hammer Price: HK$1,000,000
Sold: HK$1,200,000
Lot 157 | Liu Guosong (b. 1932) | Space Series: Which is Earth? No. 10, ink and colour on paper
Executed 1969-1973
141.2 x 77 cm
Provenance:
- Sotheby's Taipei, 18 October 1998, Lot 20
- Private Collection, Asia
Estimate: HK$800,000 - 1,200,000
Hammer Price: HK$800,000
Sold: HK$960,000
Lot 104 | Takashi Murakami (b. 1962) | Yume Lion Silver Edition (The Dream Lion), pure silver sculpture
Executed in 2015
Edition: 2/5
Sculpture: 27 x 23 x 35 cm; Pedestal: 27 x 26.5 x 4.5 cm
Provenance:
- Galerie Perrotin, Hong Kong, China
- Acquired from the above by the present owner
Estimate: HK$420,000 - 650,000
Hammer Price: HK$420,000
Sold: HK$504,000
Lot 129 | Li Hei Di (b. 1997) | Four Sisters, oil and collage on canvas
Painted in 2018
150 x 120 cm
Provenance:
- Acquired directly from the artist
- Private Collection, USA
- Heritage Auctions Dallas, 19 November 2025, Lot 77073
- Acquired from the above sale by the present owner
Estimate: HK$350,000 - 550,000
Hammer Price: HK$350,000
Sold: HK$420,000
Lot 105 | Yayoi Kusama (b. 1929) | Rose, enamel and ink on paperboard
Executed in 1979
26.5 x 23 cm
Provenance:
- Whitestone Gallery, Tokyo, Japan
- Acquired from the above by the present owner
Estimate: HK$100,000 - 200,000
Hammer Price: HK$140,000
Sold: HK$168,000
Auction Details:
Auction House: Poly Auction Hong Kong
Sale: Modern and Contemporary Art
Date: 6 April 2026
Number of Lots: 69
Sold: 46
Unsold: 23
Sale Rate: 67%
Sale Total: Around HK$76.4 million