Welcome to The Asia Fulcrum, Cultural Fulcrum‘s dedicated section exploring the art markets, cultural currents, and ideas shaping Asia, its diaspora, and their connections with the wider world.

This edition features my column examining Asia’s cultural presence in London during Frieze Week, alongside The Asia Edit—our fortnightly roundup of essential news and developments.

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Why London is the Best Place to Experience Asia

Ever since relocating from Hong Kong to London, I have increasingly felt that the British capital is one of the best places to experience Asia. I know what you might be thinking: shouldn’t one experience Asia in Asia?

The kind of experience I mean isn’t about immersing yourself in a local Asian environment (though London has some of the best dim sum, trust me). It is about discovering new figures, ideas, and cross-cultural connections.

Only after moving to London did I realise how siloed Asia has always been. Living in Hong Kong, it is easy to become so consumed by local happenings that you forget to look beyond your immediate surroundings. Focus predictably centres on the Sinophone world and China’s overwhelming presence. While some attention turns towards Japan, Korea, and parts of Southeast Asia, exposure to other Asian regions remains surprisingly limited. Inter-Asian dialogue was relatively scarce.

London has made me realise just how much more there is to see.

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This story was originally published on art market data platform Arthur Analytics on September 30, 2026.

Sotheby’s strategy to bring a prestigious trove of Léonard Tsuguharu Foujita’s art to Hong Kong paid off splendidly. The Foujita Lexicon: Works from the Lewis Collection sold all 15 lots on Monday at the house’s Maison in Central, bringing HK$67.2 million ($8.7 million) after fees. The hammer total of HK$52.8 million ($6.7 million) was more than three times the presale low estimate of HK$16.5 million ($2 million). Top lot Le rêve (Hommage à La Fontaine) (1949) hammered at HK$21 million (approximately $2.68 million) after a five-way bidding war, over five times its presale low estimate, before selling for HK$26.5 million ($3.4 million) with fees.

While modest in scale—and short of Foujita’s £7 million ($9.38 million) auction record set in 2018 for La fête d’anniversaire (1949) at Bonhams London—the single-artist sale, Sotheby’s first for Foujita in Asia, demonstrated strong room enthusiasm. The results hint at unmapped market potential for the 20th-century Japanese master and his cross-cultural peers.

“Foujita is particularly interesting because he occupies a genuine intersection between Asian and Western art history,” said art advisor Gladys Lin, who attended the Hong Kong previews. Paired with strong Western provenance like the Lewis Collection, she noted, the artist offers a highly relevant narrative for cross-cultural collecting.

Journeying Between East and West

The foundation for this enduring appeal was laid early in Foujita’s career. Born in Tokyo in 1886, he moved to France in 1913 after studying Western-style painting in Japan. His synthesis of Eastern sensibilities and Western technique earned him acclaim within the École de Paris, where his enigmatic cats and female figures on signature “milky white” grounds captivated the Montparnasse circle alongside Amedeo Modigliani, Pablo Picasso, Diego Rivera, and Fernand Léger.

“He was part of the history of the École de Paris itself, not simply an Asian artist validated by the West,” Lin added. “That gives him a position legible both within Japanese Modern art and European Modernism.”

Following extensive travels, two World Wars, and controversy surrounding his war paintings, Foujita left Japan permanently in 1949. He became a French citizen in 1957 and died in Zurich in 1968 at age 81.

Foujita’s market peaked early in the late 1980s during Japan’s economic bubble, then cooled down following the market correction.

The 15 works at the Sotheby’s Hong Kong sale span 1914 to 1953, encompassing early Paris periods, 1920s figurative pieces, 1930s compositions, and postwar output. All were acquired at auction by British billionaire Joe Lewis and his daughter Vivienne between 1992 and 2018, coinciding with a broader international resurgence in demand.

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The Top Lots

Offering the Lewis Collection in Hong Kong followed strong Asian participation in Sotheby’s London sale in June, where Asian buyers bid on half of the lots and bought one-third of them. Asian buyers accounted for 85% of bidders on Foujita at Sotheby’s over the past three years.

The auction total reached 2.3 times the works’ combined previous auction prices. Bids came from across Asia, Europe, and Latin America, according to Evelyn Lin, Sotheby’s chairman of Modern and contemporary art, Asia.

“Foujita appeals to a global collector base that values artists occupying important places in both Asian and Western art histories,” Evelyn Lin said.

Japan’s Musée Ando à Karuizawa bought the top two lots, while seven other works are slated for display at a summer 2028 Foujita exhibition at the Clark Art Institute in Massachusetts.

Founded in 2022 by Japanese financier Yasushi Ando and his wife, Megumi, the private museum holds over 200 works by the artist. Its top acquisition, Le rêve (Hommage à La Fontaine), nearly quadrupled in value over a decade to become the fifth most expensive Foujita work sold at auction, surpassing Portrait d’Hélène Franck (1924), which fetched ¥506,000,000 ($3,190,149) at SBI Art Auction in Tokyo in March, according to Arthur Analytics.

The museum also secured Nu assoupi sur la table (1927) for HK$6.5 million ($828,864) at the hammer and HK$8.3 million ($1 million) with fees—over 24 times its 2014 auction price. The third top lot, Chatte et chaton (1932), fetched HK$5.76 million ($734,501), double its 2016 price.

Beyond the Western Blue-chip Names

The results mirror growing institutional and commercial interest in Asian modernist pioneers in Europe. Last year, National Gallery Singapore staged “City of Others: Asian Artists in Paris, 1920s–1940s,” tracing figures like Sanyu, Georgette Chen, and Lê Phổ alongside Foujita.

Could the solid results of the Foujita sale inspire the market to revisit this group of artists who also occupy a space in both Asian and Western art histories?

Sanyu’s market surged pre-pandemic when Five Nudes (1950–59) set an artist record of HK$303.9 million ($38.7 million) at Christie’s Hong Kong in 2019. Records for Georgette Chen (HK$14.29 million/$1.8 million) and Lê Phổ (HK$18.6 million/$2.36 million) both reached new highs in 2023.

Ultimately, while Sanyu, Chen, and Lê Phổ have solidified their status among regional art connoisseurs, Foujita’s unique positioning allows him to bridge two distinct market segments.

“Foujita may appeal to an additional group of collectors who are specifically interested in artists that connect Asian art history with the Western canon,” said Gladys Lin. “For Asian collectors, there is growing interest in artists who connect back to an Asian cultural context while maintaining an established place within the international canon.”

Welcome to The Asia Fulcrum, where I report and analyse culture news and debates on Asia and its diaspora.

Happy Mid-Autumn Festival! This major (and my favourite) festival symbolises reunion with our loved ones as we get ready for the last quarter of the year. As I munch on mooncakes, I’m introducing this new column The Asia Edit, a fortnightly news round up of Asia’s art worlds and beyond.

This week is all about the deets on Hong Kong’s autumn auction week, upcoming fairs and events, and rather bizarrely, someone in Hong Kong might have moved Alicja Kwade’s big stone from a chair onto the ground.

Here’s what you need to know.

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Welcome to The Asia Fulcrum, where I report and analyse culture news and debates related to Asia and its diaspora.

UPDATE on August 26, 2026: “Taiwan Pavilion” is reinstated at the Gwangju Biennale, according to Taiwan’s Ministry of Culture and and the Biennale.

However, this has not changed the fact that Taiwan has been marginalised on the global culture stage over the past two decades. While the liberal Western art world has been vocal about global injustices, few have spoken up for Taiwan.

Here’s my original analysis published on August 17, 2026.

The Disappearance of “Taiwan Pavilion”

The latest publicity materials of the upcoming Gwangju Biennale, due to open in South Korea on September 4, have stirred anger and frustration among members of the Taiwanese artistic community over the weekend. They learnt that “Taiwan Pavilion” has disappeared from the event’s promotional key art on social media. Instead of having a pavilion named after the self-governed island, it became “NTMoFA Pavilion”—the name stands for National Taiwan Museum of Fine Arts, organisers of the pavilion.

The Taiwan exhibition’s team of 10, including curator and artists, accused the Gwangju Biennale of “political censorship” as it “brutally erased Taiwan” from the promotional poster, alleging that the organisers have never explained to the team why Taiwan Pavilion—the name under which NTMoFA submitted the exhibition proposal and was accepted by the Gwangju Biennale Foundation—was removed without the consent from the participating team.

“Throughout this incident, the Gwangju Biennale Foundation disregarded repeated objections and attempts at negotiation by the National Taiwan Museum of Fine Arts,” the participating team said in a statement. They demanded the organisers to “explain why participants' right to name and identify themselves must be subjected to political restrictions.”

“This goes beyond the removal of a name,” the exhibition team said. “It is a threat to freedom of expression and to the global artistic community.”

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