I can't believe we're already halfway through summer! The past couple of months have been fairly busy for me with the Toronto Asian Art sales and a trip to Vancouver at the end of June, numerous appraisals and valuations in July, AND the completion of my latest Chinese Art auction market trends report for Orientations magazine. This article will be published in their September/October issue and will be available in most museum bookstores by the end of August. As usual, I will

For those who have been following my blogs over the past three years, you probably noticed that I write a lot about my visits to Asian Art collections in museums and auction house previews from all over the world. These include stops to New York, Chicago, London, Paris and Hong Kong. I do feel guilty since my hometown of Toronto definitely features fantastic Asian Art collections. These are spread out through a couple of institutions, with the Royal Ontario Museum (ROM) being

Hope everyone had a wonderful summer! It's definitely been a while since my last blog... and if you haven't read it yet, it was an in-depth examination of the Chinese Imperial Yangcai 'Crane and Deer' Vase from the Qianlong Period (1736-1795) that Sotheby's found in an old green shoebox. This 'shoebox vase' sold for an incredible €16 million! My summer ended up being fairly busy with various consulting projects and appraisal work. However, I did manage to visit Boston for a

It's been a crazy couple of weeks, but I'm finally back home for the next little while. I just returned from Vancouver after a week-long business trip and I'm now slowly trying to catch up with all my Toronto-related work. For the past few hours I have been organizing the hundreds of photos I took during New York Asia Week. Asia Week is a series of Asian Art related events that take place in Manhattan over a period of ten days in mid-March. In addition to museums showcasing n

Happy 2018! The last two months have been fairly busy with work - hence the gap between posts. I've been fortunate enough to pick up a few more appraisal assignments and I just completed my next market trends report for Orientations Magazine in Hong Kong. The latter will be published in their March New York Asia Week edition. For this forthcoming article, in addition to strong prices in the Chinese Art market for classical furniture, Imperial porcelain and jade carvings, I tr

It’s been a crazy 2.5 weeks, but I finally made it back to Toronto! I was on the road for the last while - consisting of an 8-day stop in London followed by 6 days in New York City. In London, I attended the Asian Art in London festivities. Just like Asia Week NYC, the London events featured previews at multiple auction houses on the international and regional level. In addition were new Asian-themed museum exhibitions, gallery and dealer shows, and various Asian Art lectures

October is almost over! It's been a busy month of traveling, especially after I survived a recent eight day visit to Vancouver - the majority of the time was spent on client meetings, but I did manage to go on a couple of relaxing hikes and eat plenty of fresh sushi. Museum-wise, I caught the last day of 'Traces of Words: Art and Calligraphy from Asia' at the Museum of Anthropology at the University of British Columbia. I also saw a fantastic exhibition at the Poly Culture Ar

I can't believe it has been 2 months since my visit to Hong Kong! If you haven't read my companion post about to my trip in late May, please click here. The main purpose of the visit was to attend the numerous Chinese Art auction previews at Bonham's, Christie's, Sotheby's and China Guardian. It was pretty crazy just to see the number of artwork available for sale, and the size of the auction spaces were much larger than what I was accustomed to seeing in New York and London.

One of the prerequisites for my work is to have a strong Asian Art reference library - this is necessary for tasks such as writing an article, researching and finding comparables for a specific item, or checking for provenance. For those of you who visited my Toronto office, you have probably seen my research library and the hundreds of catalogues and books from international auctions, museums and dealers that are contained in over five Ikea Billy bookcases (note: Billy bookc

I survived another Asia Week! The 2017 edition of Asia Week New York marked my 10th consecutive year of attending the weeklong festivities for Asian art collectors, dealers, academics and enthusiasts. On the program were over twenty auctions, gallery openings and new museum exhibitions taking place from March 9th to March 18th. The auction previews are always one of the highlights for my annual March trip to NYC. It is one of the best opportunities to see all the great pieces

Happy belated Chinese New Year! January 28, 2017 marks the beginning of the rooster year and the end of the monkey year (my Chinese zodiac sign). I'm definitely no Chinese zodiac master, and through my 'scientific' online searches, I realized there are probably dozens of conflicting characteristics for people born under this sign (take 2017 and keep subtracting multiples of 12 to see if you are born in the year of the rooster, i.e. 2005, 1993, 1981, etc). People born in the y