Christie’s in New York is set to offer 138 lots of ceramics and other Chinese artifacts from James Lally’s Chinese art gallery on 23 March. The auction includes objects dating back as far as the Shang Dynasty, and estimates for individual objects range from $3,000 to as high as $900,000 for a Guan bottle vase from the southern Song Dynasty. Lally, who left his post as president of Sotheby’s in North America to set up his New York gallery in 1986, will not be in the auction room himself. Instead, he will be following the sale online from the comfort of his own home, citing it as “bad form” to be present during the auction.
Lally, who closed his gallery in 2020 after 34 years in operation, has spent a lifetime studying, buying, and selling Chinese art. He says he is “completely at ease” with the sale of his inventory, explaining that it’s a practical marketing decision to sell a critical mass of good things, as it’s what brings a crowd.
Lally has been fortunate to deal in Chinese art at a time when the market has opened to a wider world and grown enormously. The market for Chinese art was once limited to a niche group of Japanese and Western collectors in the 1970s, but today, buyers from Greater China accounted for a fifth of global art sales in 2021, or $13.4 billion. Lally notes the “xenophobic” tendencies in China’s current regime, which he describes as “not so hospitable to scholars” from outside the country.
US and European museums are often unable to compete with private collectors when it comes to buying Chinese art. Dealers and auctioneers have been creative in finding new objects to fuel the market, such as inventing snuff bottles as a collecting category in the 1970s. Demand for painting and calligraphy has also increased dramatically since the arrival of Chinese buyers on the market.
Finding inventory has often been a matter of chance, and Lally fondly recalls the moment, not long after he opened his gallery, when a young man walked in with a Shang Dynasty gong—a bronze vessel shaped like a gravy boat. The young man had inherited it from his father and was not really interested in Chinese art himself, but he wanted to buy a sailboat and wondered if the gong was valuable enough to pay for it. Lally was pleased to inform him that it was valuable enough to buy two sailboats. Lally believes that there are still objects waiting to be discovered, and there will always be surprises in the market.
Christie’s in New York is set to offer 138 lots of ceramics and other Chinese artifacts from James Lally’s Chinese art gallery on 23 March. The auction includes objects dating back as far as the Shang Dynasty, and estimates for individual objects range from $3,000 to as high as $900,000 for a Guan bottle vase from the southern Song Dynasty. Lally, who left his post as president of Sotheby’s in North America to set up his New York gallery in 1986, will not be in the auction room himself. Instead, he will be following the sale online from the comfort of his own home, citing it as “bad form” to be present during the auction.
