Hong Kong, 15 May 2026 - Phillips has announced highlights from its upcoming Modern & Contemporary Art Sale, a live auction taking place at 4pm HKT on 2 June at the house's Asia headquarters in Hong Kong's West Kowloon Cultural District. The sale is led by Matthew Wong's The Recluse (2017), estimated at HK$5,500,000 to 8,500,000 (US$705,000 to 1,090,000), and brings together works by Lee Ufan, Chen Yifei, Yayoi Kusama, Ju Ming, and others. It is accompanied by two online auctions open for bidding through May and June, one featuring standout voices in contemporary art and another dedicated to prints by Zao Wou-Ki. The works will be on public view from 24 May to 2 June, offering collectors and enthusiasts the opportunity to experience them firsthand.
The live sale is anchored by The Recluse, a work that distills the emotional depth and lyrical intensity emblematic of Matthew Wong's practice. The painting unfolds as a hushed, saturated landscape in which solitude is not merely suggested but profoundly felt, thick passages of impasto surging from the flanking mountains toward a radiant sun. At its centre a solitary figure stands as a poignant emblem of Wong's enduring exploration of the tension between inner life and the external world, between isolation and communion. Executed just one year before the artist's widely acclaimed solo debut at Karma Gallery in New York, it anticipates the clarity of vision and expressive confidence that would soon bring Wong international recognition.
Highlights from the live sale
Additional highlights include Chen Yifei's Bridge Reflection (Suzhou) (1987) from his celebrated Water Villages series, a poetic vision of Suzhou poised between romanticism and realism. Rendered in layered oil paint and subtly softened with sandpaper, its mist-filled surface evokes nostalgia, while the bridge serves as a metaphor for the convergence of personal memory and Eastern and Western visual traditions. Lee Ufan's With Winds (1991) features prominently as well, embodying the artist's quiet poetry of suggestion through delicate brushwork that balances presence and void. Adding a vibrant burst of energy are works by two of Japan's most influential women artists: an iconic soft sculpture by Yayoi Kusama, Castle of Visionary Flowers (1988), and one of Chiharu Shiota's most recognizable State of Being sculptures, State of Being (Map) (2020), incorporating a cartographic map.
Another standout is a signature sculpture from Ju Ming's renowned Taichi Series, Taichi Series: Sparring (1995), in which the artist distills the philosophy and movement of Tai Chi into powerful, pared-down form, capturing stillness within motion. Also featured is Atsuko Tanaka's Untitled (1986), created following her involvement with the Gutai movement, which translates the ephemeral energy of her Electric Dress performance into entangled circular forms and uneven lines. The French painter Diane Dal-Pra is represented by After dinner, before bedtime (2021), reinterpreting the compositional clarity and spatial discipline of the Renaissance through a contemporary lens, inserting everyday domestic elements to explore themes of memory, care, and concealment.
Selected lots and estimates
The online auctions
Complementing the live sale, Modern & Contemporary Art: Online Auction, Hong Kong presents standout voices in contemporary art, including Katherine Bernhardt, Yoshitomo Nara, Eddie Martinez, and Julian Opie, open for bidding from 20 May to 3 June. Among its highlights is Katherine Bernhardt's Lies (2020), estimated at HK$200,000 to 300,000 (US$25,000 to 38,000). A second online sale, running from 29 May to 9 June, is a single-owner, no-reserve offering dedicated to prints by Zao Wou-Ki, assembled by an important Asian collector. Spanning four decades from the 1950s through the 1990s, the selection traces the evolution of the artist's abstract language through a medium that he treated not merely as a means of refining gesture, but as a true laboratory for exploring color, rhythm, and space. After settling in Paris in the late 1940s, Zao Wou-Ki immersed himself in the city's dynamic artistic milieu, where printmaking played a crucial role in shaping his practice. The group includes Sans titre (1963), a lithograph estimated at HK$30,000 to 50,000 (US$3,800 to 6,400).
The Modern & Contemporary Art Sale takes place on 2 June at 4pm HKT, with the auction preview running from 24 May to 2 June, 10am to 7pm, at Phillips Asia Headquarters, GF, WKCDA Tower, West Kowloon Cultural District, No. 8 Austin Road West, Kowloon, Hong Kong.
Estimates do not include buyer's premium; prices achieved include the hammer price plus buyer's premium.
(Press Release)
