The International Asian Art Fair

NEW YORK CITY

:The slip of bamboo that Anna and Brian Haughton planted a decade ago has taken over an entire mountainside. Asia Week in Manhattan, of which the Haughtons' International Asian Art Fair is a cornerstone, now encompasses two antiques shows, auctions generating a record $40 million in sales, and, phenomenally, 33 private gallery exhibits themed to the interests of collectors and scholars of Asian art.

Aficionados could be seen all over New York the last week of March, huddled in groups, discussing the events of the day, comparing exploits and triumphs. English - American, British, Canadian and Australian - was far from the only language spoken. Lilting references to Tokyo, Singapore and Hong Kong wafted through the air in German, French, Chinese, Japanese, Korean and Hindi, leaving the impression that Asia Week is not only the most international of New York's art events, it is the picture of the polyglot collecting world to come. Even Manhattan's multilingual cabbies seemed clued in.

Both The International Asian Art Far and New York Arts of Pacific Asia opened to robust crowds and steady sales on Thursday, March 31. Arts of Pacific Asia, which Caskey-Lees pioneered in California and exported to New York, closed Sunday, April 3. The International Asian Art Fair continued through Wednesday, April 6. International Show attendance reached 14,000 and, according to exhibitors at both fairs, mainland Chinese and Taiwanese buyers were out in force.

The Chinese government's request for sweeping restrictions on the importation of Chinese antiquities into the United States, a request that is currently under review, has only enhanced Asia Week's beauty, which, endangered, seems all the rarer and more precious.

One can already see the market changing. When the International Asian Art Fair debuted in 1996, it dazzled visitors with monumental stone carving from India, China and Southeast Asia and with gargantuan Chinese bronzes. There are fewer antiquities in the fair today and far more contemporary material, particularly Chinese painting and Japanese ceramics. In the not very distant future the first decade of the International Asia Art Fair may be remembered as the zenith of a golden age of collecting.

The show still offers outstanding sculpture, most memorably in the booths of John Eskenazi and Doris Wiener/Nancy Wiener Gallery.

Mr Eskenazi sold his centerpiece, an Eleventh Century South Indian bronze family group of Shiva, his wife Parvati and son Skanda to an American private collector for a seven-figure sum. A voluptuous sandstone Maya, mother of Buddha, that greeted visitors as they entered the show, also sold to an American private collector.

Doris Wiener/Nancy Wiener Gallery parted with their showstopper, a Twelfth to Thirteenth Century Khmer bronze 11-headed Prajnaparamita, or goddess of wisdom and compassion.

One of the International Asian Art Fair's many pleasures is its opening night, which was attended by 1,300 and raised a record $800,000 for Asia Society. The glamorous benefit committee is peppered with names like Robert and Marie-Chantal Miller and Sir Evelyn and Lady Lynn de Rothschild, and people-watching is unsurpassed. Richard C. Holbrooke, the diplomat, flirted on the Armory steps with his journalist wife, Kati Marton. Christopher Davidge, late of Christie's, strolled the aisles with his bejeweled consort, Amrita Jhaveri. The opening is a popular outing for curators, who tend to be less exotically dressed. The RSVP list for museum folk on opening night alone was three pages long.

Opening night at the International Asian Art Fair is one place where black attire is not dominant. The party is a swirl of brilliant kimonos and saris, worn by revelers who might have stepped out of Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon. Appropriately, Tim Yip's dazzling costumes for the Ang Lee film were on loan to the International Asian Art Fair this year, secured for the show by Chinese contemporary art specialist Michael Goedhuis.

Not surprisingly, antique costumes and textiles have been an important focus at show since day one. This year, Malcolm Fairley, Ltd, of London made a masculine statement with a mid-Edo period Japanese suit of armor, $55,000, that would have looked well on Tom Cruise in The Last Samurai.

"I brought all export textiles this year," said Titi Halle, who has expanded the range of Cora Ginsburg, LLC, since acquiring the famous costumer. The dealer's piece de resistance was a ravishingly fresh painted and dyed Indian palampore made for the European market early in the Eighteenth Century. Similar in appearance was a late Seventeenth Century Sumatran chintz canopy from the Coromandel Coast at Tai Gallery/Textile Arts of Santa Fe.

Nine and a half yards of the most delectable Chinese painted silk, made for the European market around 1800, was $25,000 at Jacqueline Simcox. "I like to bring a mix of the scholarly and the decorative," said the London dealer, who awed viewers with the framed remnants of an impossibly early silk Mongol saddle, circa 1279-1368.

Francesca Galloway's stand was an essay on cultural crosscurrents. The London dealer offered a circa 1825 illuminated gouache of the Divan-I, or Hall of Private Audiences, within Delhi's Red Fort. She also featured an Eighteenth Century Mughal cut-velvet cushion cover. Sales included a Mughal floral-lattice carpet fragment.

Asian carpets are coming into sharper focus thanks to Sandra Whitman, the San Francisco dealer whose inventory ranges late Ming to Art Deco examples. Her frontispiece was an understated, geometric Ningxia carpet dating from the Kangxi period (1661-1722).

The Kang Collection-Korean Art of New York - whose attendants on opening night wore flowing, peony-colored gowns - showed exquisite silk costumes, including an embroidered bridal coat. Paintings and screens headed the list of Kang Collection sales.

Supply and demand has ensured high prices at auction for Korean art over the past decade. Even so, specialists in Korean art have not been a big presence at the International Asian Art Fair. That is changing.

In addition to Kang Collection, the show included Koo New York, whose debut display was accented by an incised and inlaid celadon glazed figure of a Nahan, or monk, Koryo dynasty (Tenth to Fourteenth Century), 131/2 inches tall. From the same stand, an embroidered eight-panel screen sold to a young American couple furnishing their East Coast home.

Gallery director Jiyoung Koo, former head of the Korean art department at Sotheby's, also noted an emerging interest in Korean textiles.

Japanese art, sparsely represented in the first International Asian Art Fair, now predominates in ten of the show's 55 booths. For classical Japanese art, Hiroshi Yanagi's austerely elegant presentation is unsurpassed. Among the Kyoto dealer's best pieces were a Rimpa School six-fold screen ornamented with blazing poppies on a glimmering gold field, and a wooden sculpture of a seated samurai, late Kamekura period, circa 1300.

"No, Mirviss-san, I am going to open my archival collection," master ceramicist Kawase Hasui told Joan Mirviss when he finally agreed to let her mount his first exhibition outside of Japan. The New York dealer sold nearly all of the Song dynasty-inspired wares that feature Celadon glazes and sinuous, organic forms. The artist is represented in the collections of a dozen major American museums.

Twentieth Century Japanese ceramics have been consistently admired and collected by the Japanese, but they are only now becoming familiar to wide group of American collectors, both public and private. Ms Mirviss, who has taken the lead in the field, mounted a satellite display of ceramic sculptures by Kishi Eiko and Kondo Takahiro at Barry Friedman Ltd, from March 3 to April 16.

Contemporary Japanese ceramics, metal objects and screens were intriguingly represented by London dealer Katie Jones and by Australian dealer Lesley Kehoe, whose paper-white sculptures by Nagae Shigekazo resembled outsized origami.

Chinese art has long claimed top honors in the marketplace for Asian art. Not only was it the inspiration for much Japanese and Korean art, it has been collected worldwide for centuries. The reigning status of Chinese art was reflected in the Asia Week auctions. Three lots - including a Ming dynasty porcelain vase in a rare deep violet color that brought $2 million - sold for more than a million dollars each at Sotheby's. Christie's logged a record price for snuff bottle at $665,600. The Qianlong Imperial famille rose bottle was from the J&J Collection.

"It was an exceptional collection and the prices were very high," said Robert Hall, a London dealer in Chinese snuff bottles whose own outstanding offerings in myriad colors, shapes and textures were stylishly presented in well-lit shadow boxes at the show.

Sales of Chinese art included a glazed stoneware Warring States Ding and a white porcelain Sui dynasty pilgrim flask at Uragami Sokyu-Do of Tokyo; a pair of large painted pottery Tang dynasty figures of Lokapalas and a pair of carved and painted seated deer, formerly in the Rockefeller Collection at Kykuit, at the Chinese Porcelain Company of New York; a pair of large painted pottery heavenly kings and a Tang dynasty pottery Bactrian camel with rider, at China Gallery; and a large hanging scroll by Haung Tao, 1624, at Sydney L. Moss, Ltd.

"The color has kept remarkably well," London dealer Christopher Knapton said of two large late Yuan dynasty stucco seated figures of lohans in brilliant original paint. On Knapton Rasti's back wall was an arresting, 20-foot-long Japanese harimaze-style scroll created in 1827 for the Nagasaki Fish Guild. Depicting a variety of aquatic creatures, it was $280,000.

The International Asian Art Fair is not a furniture venue, unless you count the exquisitely sculptural Ming dynasty pieces that are increasingly difficult to find. Two specialists - Andy Hei and Grace Wu Bruce, both from Hong Kong - put together handsome displays of Ming furniture, while well-known experts Nicholas Grindley and M.D. Flacks organized exhibitions at private New York galleries. Mr Hei sold a pair of huanghuali folding tables and a foot rest. Ms Bruce's signature piece was a plank-top Jiajian table, a highly abstracted version of a pedestal desk. It dated to the late Sixteenth to early Seventeenth Century and measured 91/2 feet long.

Contemporary Chinese painting, a growing category, was on hand at Michael Goedhuis, who featured works by Zhang Hongtu, an artist currently interpreting traditional Chinese landscapes using a style, palette and technique reminiscent of Van Gogh. Leon Wender of China 2000 offered contemporary landscape drawings in colored inks by Zeng Xiao Jun, an artist who draws inspiration from the scholars' rocks that he collects.

Haughton International Fairs return to New York May 13-18 with its International Fine Art Fair.