Asian Art

The Shang period (c.1600-1045BC) is the first of China’s many epochs from which written documents survive.

Thousands of items are available to buy from dealers online. Here we pick out one that caught our eye this week.

Auctions of Chinese export porcelain have regularly featured in the New York schedule in January for many years, running alongside the traditional string of Americana sales and the long-running Winter Show.

The Asian art sale at John McInnis in Massachusetts on February 25 includes this pair of Qing ‘official’s hat’ type huanghuali armchairs.

Two Chinese blue and white dishes, recognised by bidders as examples of the bleu de Huế porcelain, flew to £20,500 at a sale in Dorset on January 26.

Dr Richard Piran McClary is a senior lecturer in Islamic art and architecture in the history of art department at The University of York.

The market for ‘after’ or ‘attributed to’ works is often rather unpredictable. While some works will inevitably fall flat at auction, others sometimes take off.

Chiswick Auctions will conduct what it believes is the first ever auction devoted to Indian and Burmese silver of the Raj period on February 14.

Strong provenance helps seated guardian figure estimated at £100-150 to stand out at Derbyshire auction

With the ivory versions now heavily restricted, a New York auction provided a test of the current market

A record for Peranakan or Straits Settlement porcelain was set at an auction in Singapore when a Guangxu kamcheng took Sin$74,000 (£46,000).

On January 24 Bonhams in New York will offer a single owner-sale of more than 150 lots of Chinese export porcelain from the renowned specialist dealer in the field, Cohen & Cohen.

A major draw to a recent Dreweatts’ (25% buyer’s premium) sale of Chinese Ceramics and Works of Art was a cache of Qing porcelain and hardstone carvings previously owned by Anthony de Rothschild (1887-1961).

Dreweatts’ (25% buyer’s premium) ‘part II’ sale of Chinese Ceramics and Works of Art at the end of last year included Chinese export porcelain from ‘the china store of a Somerset country house’.

By illustrating and combining popular folk songs with scenes of dramas of the time, the artist or workshop named Ding Liangxian created a new type of woodblock print for urban Chinese audiences in the second quarter of the 18th century.

A round-up of art and antiques news from the previous seven days, including an 18th century Kyoto carving setting an auction record at Bonhams for any netsuke.