At Christie’s Hong Kong This Autumn, a Kusama Canvas Makes Its Auction Debut

Yayoi Kusama spent six decades returning to the same form — the pumpkin, its surface mapped with an obsessive regularity she described as rooted in childhood memory and fear. A-Pumpkin (YHP), a large-scale 2011 canvas centered on that motif, has never appeared at auction before. Its debut at Christie’s 20th/21st Century Autumn 2026 Sales in Hong Kong frames the season as something more than a commercial event: a gathering of works, each marking a decisive moment in an artist’s sustained relationship with a form.

Jean-Michel Basquiat’s Ancient Scientist (1984) opens the Evening Sale with the same insistence. The 169-by-156-centimeter canvas is dominated by one of the artist’s emblematic skull-like figures — a glyph that Basquiat charged with medical anatomy and Haitian Vodou cosmology in equal measure, at once dissecting the body and placing it within a larger spiritual order. Together, Basquiat and Kusama set the tone for a sale that favors works operating at a register of formal argument, not decoration.

The season’s Chinese modern selection is anchored by Zao Wou-Ki’s Voie Lactée — 09.11.1956, a rare, large-scale canvas from his Oracle Bone period. Painted in 1956, the work dissolves ancient Chinese oracle inscriptions into a dazzling constellation of calligraphic marks — forms that Zao treated as a grammar for pure pictorial space, a point where East and West met not as compromise but as a shared discovery of light. Making its auction debut alongside it is Chu Teh-Chun’s Automne (Autumn), the only snow scene in his Snow Landscape series rendered in an autumnal palette — a quiet paradox held in paint.

Entrance to Christies Hong Kong at The Henderson building Central — Photo: Honagum Suwnoo via Wikimedia Commons (CC0)

The Western Modern and Post-War selection places Gerhard Richter’s Abstraktes Bild (1991) — one of only 27 red-dominant abstractions from that year, applied with his signature squeegee — beside Paul Cézanne’s L’Assiette bleue, a still life from the series that dismantled representation from within. A Matisse figure painting, presented from the Denver Art Museum Foundation, adds a chromatic argument of another order: radical simplicity as depth. The most unexpected presence is a Baroque landscape by Sir Peter Paul Rubens, one of only two remaining in private hands, appearing at public auction for the first time in over two centuries.

The Day Sales on 30 September extend the range, led by Yoshitomo Nara’s Q&A alongside works by Christine Ay Tjoe, Jonas Wood, and Andy Warhol. The curated group Between Worlds: Property from a Distinguished Private Collection — crossing the Evening and Day formats — brings in Wang Guangyi, Derek Fordjour, and Harold Ancart, framing the season as a meditation on what it means to stand between traditions and make a choice.

The sales take place at Christie’s Asia Pacific headquarters at The Henderson in Central, Hong Kong, with a public preview running 22 to 29 September. A travelling preview opens in Taipei at Dopeness Art Lab from 12 to 13 September. The season falls within Christie’s 40th Anniversary year in Asia — four decades during which the house has shaped the region’s market — and opens it, this autumn, with a collection that tests the full range and depth that market can now sustain.

Tags: Hong Kong, Christie's, Gerhard Richter, Jean-Michel Basquiat, art auctions, Yayoi Kusama