Crazy Rich Asian Buys Oil Painting For $65 MILLION
Source – An abstract oil painting by Chinese-French master Zao Wou-Ki changed hands for HK$510.4 million ($65.2 million) at Sotheby’s on Sunday, more than 28 times its previous purchase price and setting a new record for an Asian oil painting sold at auction.
Taiwanese businessman Chang Qiu Dun, whose company P&F Brother Industrial Corp. makes treadmills and power tools, paid $2.3 million in May 2005 for ‘Juin-Octobre 1985,’ a 10-meter (33 foot) triptych he had kept at a purpose-built space adjoining his factory in the industrial city of Taichung.
At $65 million, Zao Wou-Ki joins the ranks of his postwar American contemporaries like de Kooning, Mark Rothko and Barnett Newman,” Pascal de Sarthe, a Hong Kong-based dealer who has been selling Zao’s works for 35 years, said after the sale.
I don’t even get mad at these stories anymore. They don’t surprise me. They don’t bother me. They don’t do anything for me. I’ve come to terms with the fact that some people will have more money than I’ll ever have and there’s nothing I can do about it. Sixty-five million dollars to this dude is probably what sixty dollars is to me; noticeable but nothing that I’m going to lose sleep over.
As far as the actual painting goes- it sucks.
I kind of like the green because the colors remind of Nickelodeon slime and the movie Flubber, but other than that there’s not much going on. It’s way too big to hang up too. Put something like that up in your apartment and it’ll completely take over the room.
Oh well, who am I to tell this guy how to spend his money? He’s the one who made billions off of the treadmill industry, not me. He’s like the Asian version of the Gazelle guy only without the crippling cocaine addiction.
Hopefully he keeps it somewhere safe.