What can a small bronze vessel, a clay woman from an ancient tomb, or a painted pair of empty robes tell us about the people who made and treasured them? In Sotheby’s Masterpieces of Asian Art from the Okada Museum of Art II, objects spanning nearly three thousand years offer glimpses into the lives and aesthetic ideals across China and Japan.
The collection was formed over three decades with the guidance of Kochukyo Co., Ltd., the Tokyo dealership founded in 1924 by Hirota Matsushige, later known as Fukosai. Known for its exacting standards and discerning eye, Kochukyo has advised generations of private collectors and museums.
Returning to Hong Kong after the success of last year’s US$88.4-million sale, the Okada Museum of Art collection brings together nearly 200 exceptional pieces of East Asian art. Ahead of the auction on 4 September, we select six highlights – from a cicada‑adorned ritual bronze, a Tang hound and tomb figures to a sea-blue incense burner for the scholar’s studio, screens of sumptuous empty robes and a delicate painting of festival dolls.
A vessel for the ancestors
Lot 2055 | A small archaic ritual bronze food vessel, ding
Late Shang dynasty
Height: 16.9 cm
Provenance:
- Kochukyo Co., Ltd, Tokyo
Estimate: HK$800,000 - 1,600,000
A vessel small enough to hold in two hands, but made for one of the most important questions in ancient China: how to speak to the ancestors. Cast in the late Shang dynasty, this ritual ding stands just under 17 cm high on three columnar legs, its surface crowded with symbolic motifs. Bird-like dragons confront one another across shallow flanges, while rows of pendant triangles around the lower body enclose cicadas.
For the ancient Chinese, the cicada was a symbol of resurrection. Newly hatched, it drops from the branches and burrows underground, only to emerge years later, transformed, into the light. Born from mud yet untainted, it was seen as a natural bridge between the world of the living and the realm of the dead.
On a vessel made to carry offerings to ancestral spirits, the cicadas were fitting messengers. One of the most important ritual vessel types of ancient China, the ding began as a cooking vessel before becoming central to ceremonies in which food was prepared or presented for the dead.
It was also a marker of power and authority. Legend held that the ancient ruler Yu cast nine ding – one for each province of the realm – as emblems of heaven's mandate. In the Bronze Age, a man’s rank could be measured in part by the number of ding he possessed. In later centuries, the form was reproduced in ceramics and metalwork, often as incense burners, its offerings shifting from food to fragrant smoke.
A Silk Road Hound
Lot 2002 | A rare amber-glazed figure of a dog
Tang dynasty
Height: 25.4 cm
Provenance:
- Collection of Marquis Hosokawa Moritatsu (1883–1970), Tokyo, by 1928
- Kochukyo Co., Ltd, Tokyo
- Uragami Sokyu-do Co., Ltd, Tokyo
Estimate: HK$150,000 - 300,000
Dogs have accompanied humans for millennia, but in Tang China their companionship could extend into the afterlife. Tombs of the period were furnished with the splendours of the living world – vivid murals, delicate gold and silver artefacts, sancai-glazed figures of horses, camels, court ladies, musicians, and fierce guardians. Animals formed a lively part of these assemblages, yet representations of dogs remain comparatively rare among surviving examples.
The dog depicted here belongs to a type generally associated with Central Asian sighthounds, particularly the Saluki: slender, long-limbed hunting dogs prized for speed and keen sight. Distinguished from greyhounds by their long, pendulous ears, dogs of this kind appear in Tang paintings as companions of the elite, signalling a taste for the foreign luxuries that the Silk Road made possible.
Few comparable ceramic examples have survived. Those that have – among them an amber-glazed figure in the Tokyo National Museum and a white-and-green-glazed example in the Metropolitan Museum of Art – tend toward the rigid and frontal. The present figure, by contrast, has a greater sense of movement and animation, placing it among the more accomplished surviving works of its kind.
The present lot
An amber-glazed example in the Tokyo National Museum
A white-and-green-glazed example in the Metropolitan Museum of Art
Incense in the scholar’s studio
Lot 2157 | An heirloom Longquan celadon 'peony' tripod incense burner
Southern Song – Yuan dynasty
Width: 13.8 cm
Estimate: HK$300,000 - 600,000
Sturdily potted yet gracefully poised on three small bulbous feet, this incense burner is robed in a luminous sea-blue celadon glaze. A peony scroll joined by trailed stems enlivens the surface, its crisp ornament softened beneath the generously applied glaze.
Its understated elegance reflects the refined sensibility of Song China, one of the great high points of Chinese art. It was a society deeply attuned to subtlety, restraint and harmony, values that shaped painting, poetry and calligraphy as much as the objects of cultivated daily life.
Incense was closely woven into this culture. More than a sensory pleasure, it was associated with clarity of mind, accompanying the literati’s writing, music, study, conversation and contemplation. As its use became more intimate, burners too became smaller and simpler than the elaborate censers of earlier periods.
This burner was made at the Longquan kilns of southern Zhejiang, whose celadons were admired for their jade-like depth and softness. Its three-footed profile also looks back to archaic bronze vessels, which Song scholars collected and studied as models from antiquity.
A witness from ancient Japan
Lot 2005 | A Haniwa earthenware figure of a woman
Late Kofun period, 5th-6th century
Height: 74 cm
Provenance:
- Excavated at Takasai-mura, Ibaraki Prefecture
- Kochukyo Co., Ltd
Estimate: HK$200,000 - 300,000
Before Buddhism changed the shape of death in Japan, the country's most powerful clan chiefs were buried beneath enormous mounds of earth. Around these tombs stood haniwa – hollow clay figures set on and around the graves of elites from around the third to the seventh century.
The earliest haniwa were simple cylinders, but over time they developed into houses, armour, ships, animals, and eventually human figures of every kind. In the absence of written records, they stand among the few surviving witnesses to how people in Kofun‑period Japan lived.
Haniwa around kofun at the Chiba Prefectural Open Air Museum (Boso no Mura)
Warriors are common among human haniwa, evidence of a military class long before the better‑known warrior clans of medieval Japan. The woman here, balancing a sake jar on her head, is thought to represent a miko, a female shaman or shrine attendant. Around her neck she wears a magatama, the curved jewel carried as a protective talisman. Traces of red pigment remain on her face, clothing, and vessel.
What haniwa were for remains debated. Some scholars see them as markers of a sacred boundary; others believe they reenacted burial ceremonies or rituals of succession. A more practical view holds that their earliest function was to stabilise the sloping sides of the mound.
Lot 2017 | A Haniwa model of a warrior
Kofun period, 5th-6th century
Height: 101.3 cm (the tip of the hat to the feet)
Provenance:
- Kochukyo Co., Ltd, Tokyo
Estimate: HK$120,000 - 150,000
Whose Sleeves?
Lot 2016 | Anonymous | Whose Sleeves? (Tagasode), ink, colour, gold and gofun on paper, silk brocade borders, lacquered wood mounts
Edo period, early 17th century
Each screen (when unfolded): approximately 116 x 276 cm
Provenance:
- Hasunuma Family
Estimate: HK$300,000 - 500,000
Sumptuous robes on kimono stands, books left open, an incense burner, a board game – and no one in sight. In the genre known as tagasode, literally “whose sleeves?”, the viewer is confronted with a question: who is the wearer?
Garments draped over clothing stands emerged as a subject in painting in the early 17th century, but the idea reaches back to Heian-period court poetry, where scented sleeves symbolised an absent lover. Court women of the period could only be glimpsed through curtains or screens, leaving a suitor to judge taste, refinement, and desirability from the robes alone.
What hangs on the kimono stands here is military-class dress. On one screen, a man’s formal samurai ensemble and a woman’s robe are emblazoned with family crests. A near-translucent summer overvest hangs beside an open copy of the Confucian Analects, its text rendered in such precise detail that the first page seems almost legible. Unusually for tagasode screens, two birdcages housing skylarks or bush warblers are arranged around the stand.
The other screen is altogether more playful. Women’s and children’s robes are richly decorated with embroidery and gold and silver leaf, forming bold patterns of golden wisteria fronds and autumn foliage. One robe bears stylised snowflakes, completed by a group of Chinese children throwing snowballs. Together, the pair suggest an entire samurai household through dress alone.
Hina dolls for Girls’ Day
Lot 2143 | Maruyama Okyo (1733-1795) | Standing Dolls (Tachibina), ink, colour, gold, silver and gofun on silk
Edo period, late 18th century
92.2 x 33 cm
Estimate: HK$50,000 - 70,000
Every year on the third day of the third month, households across Japan bring out their hina dolls. At the centre of the display sits the emperor and empress, surrounded by court ladies, musicians, lanterns, and miniature furnishings that recreate an imperial court wedding. Known as the Doll Festival, the celebration is held for the health and happiness of girls.
The pair shown here belongs to an early type known as tachibina, or “standing hina dolls”. Made with stiff paper bodies and heads of wood or papier-mâché, such dolls preceded the seated figures that later filled elaborate Edo-period displays. The scroll itself would have been hung for the festival, once celebrated according to the lunar calendar in what is now early April.
Its painter, Maruyama Ōkyo, was among the most influential artists of 18th-century Kyoto. At a time when the art world was largely controlled by established schools, Ōkyo drew obsessively from life rather than from pattern books, combining the brush traditions of Chinese and Japanese painting with carefully selected Western techniques.
His curiosity ranged freely across subject and register. He is celebrated for his ghost paintings, credited with popularising the now-iconic image of the legless spirit, and equally for his tender studies of animals. In part one of Sotheby's Okada Museum sale, his Dogs and Puppies sold for nearly HK$4.7 million, far above its HK$120,000 estimate.
Maruyama Okyo, Dogs and puppies | Sold: HK$4,699,000, Sotheby's Hong Kong, 2025
Auction Details:
Auction House: Sotheby's Hong Kong
Sale: Masterpieces of Asian Art from the Okada Museum of Art II
Date and Time: 4 September 2026 | 10:00 am (Hong Kong local time)
Number of Lots: 188