The painter Qi Baishi has become the first Chinese artist to join the $100 million club.
A set of Qi’s ink-brush panels, Twelve Landscape Screens (1925), sold for $140.8 million (931.5 million yuan) on Sunday at Poly Beijing. It is the highest price ever paid for a work of Chinese art at auction.
Only 15 other works—by artists including Andy Warhol, Plablo Pciasso and Vincent Van Gogh—have sold at auction for more than $100 million (accounting for inflation), though a number of others have reportedly sold privately.
Poly Beijing did not immediately respond to a request for comment. The identity of the buyer has not been made public.
Bidding was “frenetic” and conducted entirely on the phones, recounts Leon Wender, a Chinese art expert and co-founder of New York’s China 2000 Fine Art, who attended the sale.
The artist—best known for his calligraphy and brush painting—created the work in 1925, when he was 62 years old, according to a description on Poly’s website. “It can be regarded as the most expressive style from Qi Baishi’s stylistic transformations but is also the largest in dimension of the twelve landscape screens format,” the auction house says.
The only other example of the set was produced in 1932 for Sichuan military commander Wang Zuanxu and is currently in the Three Gorges Museum in Chongqing.
Wender says he was not surprised by the price, saying that the artist is “the most influential of all the Chinese artists in the 20th century.” (Another interesting fact: Qi is particularly renowned for his ability to paint shrimp.)
The artist was born to a poor family in 1864 and worked as a carpenter before he began traveling throughout China at age 40. He was “highly sought after both for his huge contributions to brush painting and calligraphy as well as great seal carving technique,” Wender said. The 12-painting set, he added, has “iron-clad provenance” and “amazing condition.”
Prior to Sunday, Qi’s auction record was $28 million (195.5 million yuan), set in December 2016 at Poly International.
The previous auction high for a Chinese painting was the $63.9 million paid in 2010 at Poly International for Di Zhu Ming, a calligraphy painting by Huang Tingjian, according to the artnet Price Database.
*extracted from artnet.com