Editor’s Note: This story originally appeared in On Balance, the ARTnews newsletter about the art market and beyond. Sign up here to receive it every Wednesday.
When the Long Museum, the private institution founded by Chinese mega-collectors Liu Yiqian and Wang Wei, began selling work last year, it felt like a sign of the times. It meant that Asian collectors were not only being less active in terms of buying. They were actively selling, too.
Previously, the paintings being sold by collectors like Liu and Wang—a $34.9 million Modigliani that appeared at Sotheby’s last year, for example—came from the West and made their way to China via flashy purchases. Today, it is the opposite: these very same paintings are being sent back to the West, where they will likely find new buyers.
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Now, there is news of at least two major paintings on the market that appear to come from China: a Warhol that, according to a source close to the gallery, is priced in excess of $100 million and a Basquiat that sold in 2013 for $29 million.
In mid-May—not coincidentally, during the major auctions in New York—Gagosian opened “Icons From a Half Century of Art,” an exhibition of paintings and sculptures by Basquiat, David Hockney, Jasper Johns, Donald Judd, Gerhard Richter, Mark Rothko, Richard Serra, Frank Stella, Cy Twombly, and Warhol. It is open only to collectors, and can only be seen by appointment at Gagosian’s 24th Street gallery in New York. The image the gallery used to promote the exhibition on its website is of a Warhol “Mao.” Warhol famously created no fewer than 199 images of “Mao,” but this isn’t just any “Mao.” It is the only one of the four so-called “giant Maos”—they stand a full 15 feet high—that is not in a museum.
The last time the Gagosian “Mao” was publicly on the market was in 2008, when Christie’s, in collaboration with London dealer James Mayor, sent the painting to Hong Kong with a price tag of $120 million. As described in write-up at the time in the Wall Street Journal, that price would have set a record for the artist: the auction record for a Warhol then was the $71.7 million Christie’s got in May 2007 for the 1963 silkscreen Green Car Crash. (The record today is the $195 million that Larry Gagosian paid for a painting of Marilyn Monroe at Christie’s in 2022.) But the “Mao” didn’t sell in 2008 in Hong Kong, and then came the recession. According to a source with close knowledge of the painting, it did, however, sell around 2013 for a price within the range of $120 million.
The person involved in that transaction, dealers say, was Rosaline Wong, who has in the past reportedly worked on behalf of Henry Cheng, chairman of Hong Kong–based New World Development. According to Forbes, Cheng, who succeeded his own father at New World, is China’s third-richest person. New World’s shares dropped 60 percent between January 2023 and January 2024, and the Cheng family’s net worth dropped by nearly a fourth, to $22.1 billion.
Wong is a former Hong Kong barrister that Artnet News and the South China Morning Post previously linked to the purchase of a $150 million Gustav Klimt painting. The painting was previously owned by Oprah Winfrey, and the transaction was brokered by Gagosian, according to Bloomberg. More recently, Artnet News linked Wong with a Klimt that sold at Sotheby’s last year for $108.4 million. Dealers who worked with Wong between 2013 and 2015 say she appeared to be buying on behalf of a foundation that was in formation.
According to South China Morning Post, around 2015, Wong founded an investment advisory company, HomeArt, which matches individuals and companies with art for sale. The SCMP reported in 2022 that at that time Wong was “in the middle of setting up a US$1 billion ‘museum-grade’ art investment fund with Hong Kong- and Singapore-based asset management firm Zheng He Capital, which counts among its heavyweight advisers Gagosian and Wong’s close friend, the Hong Kong billionaire Henry Cheng Kar-shun,” head of New World Development and father of collector Adrian Cheng, executive vice chairman and CEO of New World Development and founder of the K11 , a venture that blends art, commerce, and development, and that has an associated foundation, the K11 Art Foundation. Artnet News reported last year that Wong was “launching a fractional ownership fund specializing in museum-quality works for a broader pool of investors.”
Wong has also been linked to Joseph Lau, whose purchase of a smaller Warhol “Mao” painting in 2006 for $17 million set the stage for Christie’s bringing the “giant Mao” to Hong Kong.
Since 2021, Homeart has since done several exhibitions in collaboration with Christie’s, among them an 11-work Basquiat show in Hong Kong. That exhibition, held in May 2021, included an untitled 1982 painting that was purchased at Christie’s London in 2013 for $29 million. (It’s worth noting that Christie’s made a point of telling the New York Times just after that sale that there was a large amount of bidding from Asia.) That Basquiat painting is also in the current Gagosian “Icons” exhibition, according to several sources who have seen the show.
A representative for Gagosian declined to comment on the identity of the consignor of the Warhol and Basquiat paintings. Wong did not return a request for comment submitted to Homeart.
The four “giant Mao” paintings are so big that Warhol had to make them in the Factory’s screening room rather than the painting studio. They were so expensive to produce that he needed backing from two galleries (Knoedler & Co. and Castelli) and an avid collector of his (Peter Brant). In return, each of those parties got a “giant Mao” painting. The one Christie’s sent to Hong Kong in 2008 went through Castelli to James Mayor, who placed it in a private collection in Europe. Another was sold by Knoedler in 1974 to the Art Institute of Chicago. The third, Brant gifted in 1977 to the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York. The fourth “Mao” Warhol kept, and eventually sold it to Charles Saatchi , who eventually sold the piece to the late German collector Erich Marx, who, in 2007, put it on long-term loan to the Hamburger Bahnhof museum in Berlin.
Coincidentally, the Hamburger Bahnhof “Mao” was in the news this week. The Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung ran an op-ed by art historian Von Hubertus Butin, who speculated that the painting might soon hit the market. Marx died in 2020; three paintings from the Marx collection—two Warhols and a Twombly —that previously appeared at the Hamburger Bahnhof have been removed from the museum by his heirs. Butin writes that those paintings, which he claims are collectively worth some $170 million, have been consigned to Gagosian and that some may have sold. (Gagosian declined to comment on this; the museum said only that the paintings have been removed.) The Marx collection’s “Mao” could be next to go, Butin claimed, writing that there had at one point been a $155 million offer made for that “Mao.” The museum said it had no knowledge of this, and dealers told ARTnews that the figure seemed unrealistic. One dealer even called the sum “aspirational,” particularly in the current art market conditions.
As for whether the “Mao” at Gagosian has found a buyer, the gallery isn’t saying. The “Icons” show is up through July 19.