BY ALBERT CHEN

An abstract landscape of violet, white and dark, restless brushwork achieved £384,500 at Bonhams London, placing contemporary painting among the major results of the auction house’s November Asian Art Week. Yi Ming’s Dawning: Where Night’s Last Dew Meets First Light, painted in 2012, sold in the Fine Chinese Art auction at New Bond Street on November 5, 2026. The reported price includes buyer’s premium.

Born in 1974, Yi Ming works across disciplines. Bonhams’ catalogue describes a career extending into film art direction and fashion criticism, and credits the artist with image-design roles for the Beijing Olympic Games in 2008 and the Beijing Winter Olympics in 2022. Here, the focus is on oil painting: a signed and dated composition in which sweeping pale passages meet denser, broken marks, producing a landscape that is suggested rather than precisely mapped.

A Landscape Between Ink Tradition and Abstraction

Bonhams places the painting in dialogue with the Chinese landscape tradition and Western abstract expressionism, particularly the use of open space associated with liubai, or “leaving blank.” Its catalogue also draws comparisons with the approaches of Zao Wou-Ki and Chu Teh-Chun. In Dawning, the vertical composition invites the eye to travel through layers of color and texture, while dark strokes interrupt the lighter atmosphere like shifting fragments of terrain.

The result stood alongside strong prices for very different kinds of Chinese art. Other highlights of the same sale included a Qianlong white-and-russet jade carving of an elephant and boy and a pair of Yongzheng imperial blue-and-white “Peaches” dishes, each at £77,300. Across five London and online sales, Bonhams reported a combined £4.8 million. Against that broader picture, Dawning brought a contemporary painter’s interpretation of landscape into the same market conversation as jade carving and imperial porcelain.

Source: Bonhams.

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