Yayoi Kusama’s work sells for $23m at Hong Kong auction
A collection of five works by Yayoi Kusama from the last 20 years were sold for $22.9million during a recent auction at Sotheby’s in Hong Kong. It ranks among one of the artist’s highest auction sales to date.
Kusama was among the most prominent names anchoring back-to-back sales of modern and contemporary art, which generated HKD $1.52billion ($192.8m) and 11 new artist records by the day’s end.
Pumpkin (L) is an oversized sculpture of a bronze pumpkin that Kusama’s studio produced in 2014, which was sold over the phone for HKD $62.64m ($7.98m), setting a new standard for a sculpture by the Japanese artist.
A-Pumpkin (BAGN8), a painting depicting the same vegetable with black dots, went for HK$55.17m ($7m). Elsewhere, Kusama’s 2018 piece My Heart is Flying to the Universe, a mirrored box with LED lighting and a face hole for viewers to see inside, fetched HKD $25.9m ($3.29m). This sale was the first time a work of its kind had been sold at a public auction in Asia.
Aged 94, Kusama’s works are currently at the most popular they’ve ever been. She is currently the subject of a retrospective at the M+ museum in Hong Kong and a campaign by Louis Vuitton.
