Earlier this year, I wrote that even during the construction phase of its new Masion concept in Landmark CHATER, Sotheby’s was offering a museum-like experience to the thousands of passersby who use that corridor as part of their daily walking commutes. Sotheby’s construction boards featured strikingly well-reproduced images and accompanying explanatory text organized thematically just like in a museum. During the summer, the boards came down and the 24,000 sq. foot Maison opened complete with seven Salons on the first floor offering art, decorative objects, collectibles, and luxury goods available to “buy now” at set prices, and a breathtaking ground floor space, itself a work of art, in which visitors can experience special exhibitions.
According to Landmark’s press release, on offer in the Salons are more than “200 objects spanning geographies and genres from across 80 million years of history …with prices ranging from HK$5,000 to HK$50 million.” The Salons can be viewed from the corridor through the glass walls, which are adorned with quotes that align with a particular Salon’s theme. Even if you are not looking to buy (and in fact a few of the displayed works are not available for sale), you are genuinely welcome to walk inside the Salons and enjoy a closer look at the thematically-displayed art and objects. On any given day, people are taking photos from both inside and outside the Salons. Labels describe each item. Within the Salons, modern music adds to the atmosphere. The staff are very friendly. Should the desire to learn more about an item for purchase strike you, there are Sotheby’s team members in cream-colored aprons with tablets to assist you. Interactive “What’s On” kiosks are also there to help you navigate your way through the Salons.
The Salons’ displays certainly cover a range of interests and art forms from paintings to first edition books to masks to furniture to fossils and everything in between.
Are you a fan of the Emmy-winning 2024 television series based on James Clavell’s historical fiction novel Shogun? Head over to the Salon featuring quotes from Clavell and H.G. Wells, author of War of the Worlds. There you will find a first edition of Shogun displayed together with a “rokumai-do gusoku [armour with six-piece cuirass].” The helmet bears a signature and monogram from 1839.
If traditional European painting and decorative arts are of interest, look for the Salon glass wall bearing quotes from Dante Alighieri (author of The Divine Comedy) and E.M. Forrester (author of A Room with a View and A Passage to India). Here you will find Marc Chagall’s Scène de Cirque, as well as furniture and other paintings and sketches. Have you always wanted to see a Banksy? Girl Without Balloon is on display along with a wonderfully delightful Mouton Transhumant (Brebis), a female sheep, by François-Xavier Lalanne. Both are in the Salon that features quotes from the award-winning British science fiction novel, The Unlimited Dream Company.
Included in the Salon that focuses more specifically on Asian and African art and objects is Buncheong Flat Bottle by Lee Kang Hyo, one of Korea’s leading potters whose works have been exhibited in the Victoria and Albert Museum and Boston’s Museum of Fine Arts. Collectibles, like a sports jersey, and luxury goods, including handbags and jewelry, are on view at two other Salons.
What is also a work of art itself, and almost more impressive than anything displayed on the first floor, is the ground floor exhibition space, which can be accessed by either an elevator/lift or a staircase located in the luxury goods Salon on the Chater road side of the atrium. Creatively lit with beautifully carved wood, even the stairway evokes a sense of other-worldliness, as if you are descending into the earth. This feeling grows as you enter the darkened space below with its soaring ceiling, black carved walls, and oversized black museum panels, which share wonderfully detailed information about the exhibits and works on display. In a nod to the practice on the first floor, quotes are also printed on the walls, but here they are displayed using the ground floor’s aesthetic. Lighting is targeted and often from above, as if it is finding its way through a space in the earth. Down here classical music is playing. All the distraction from above the surface has been eliminated to focus your attention on the art around you. The space, the way the art is displayed, and the works themselves, combine to make “a portal to a world of boundless inspiration and discovery” that Sotheby’s aims for the Maison to be.
The ground floor space is actually three exhibition spaces, the largest of which is the “Grotto.” Currently on exhibit is Chang Dai-chien’s “monumental, splashed ink masterpiece” The Giant Lotuses. The large information boards with photographs and comments from colleagues and family amplify the viewing experience by explaining the work’s theme and history, as well as Chang’s goals and creative process, which included the laborious process of grinding the ink for the oversized six-panel work.
Also displayed in the Grotto is the beautiful calligraphy exhibit entitled Emperor Renzong [of Northern Song] and Emperor Gaozong [of Southern Song] Preface to the Poems Composed at the Orchid Pavillion After Wang Nizhi from the Poon Family Collection. As the information board explains, since the Song dynasty emperors have copied “prized calligraphies” because doing so was “[t]he most profound and surest way to assimilate the past” and the past “establish[ed] one’s moral rectitude, wisdom and political legitimacy….[C]opying Wang Nizhi’s Preface…would have imbued [the two Emperors] with a strong sense of legitimacy.”
The second gallery space, the “Sanctum,” is located at one end of the Grotto behind a wood door. Here the ICE exhibit features two objects that echo one another— a Ru ware brush washer from the Song Dynasty and Gerhard Richter’s Eisberg, which shows an arctic sea based on photographs the artist took while he was in Greenland. According to an article
about Ru ware in the British Museum, “Ru ware is the most prized and rarest of all Chinese ceramics,” because the kiln that produced it was only in operation for 20 years. Fewer than 100 pieces are thought to exist, notes the 2022 article. As the ICE didactic text explains, Ru ware “with its glowing, intense blue green glaze and ’ice crackle’ has over the course of a millennium gained mythical status as an emblem of Chinese philosophy and aesthetics.”
The third gallery space is the “Pantheon.” Currently on display here are additional calligraphy from the Poon Family Collection, Mark Rothko’s painting Untitled (blue and yellow), which will be on auction in November, and scholar rocks from The Jiansongge Collection. Though at first, they may seem like disparate elements, these pieces come together to form a unique viewing experience.
From the initial construction boards imprinted with information and beautifully reproduced images of art, which flanked the CHATER house atrium during Sotheby’s renovation of the 24,000 sq. foot space, to the newly opened Salons and ground floor exhibit space, Sotheby’s has and continues to offer the Hong Kong public an opportunity to take a journey with art in all its forms. Whether viewed as part of a walking commute or as a deliberate destination to be explored more fully, Sotheby’s Maison is an experience not to be missed.
Explore the history of Chinese solid ink and the ink grinding process Chang Dai-chien used to create his masterpiece The Giant Lotuses. Discover the masterful images Sotheby's used to create an art history experience for passersby during the construction phase of the Maison.
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