By Katya Kazakina and Linda Sandler

 
March 28 (Bloomberg) -- New York dealer William Acquavella, who

specializes in Western artists such as Paul Cezanne and Francis Bacon,

is selling a collection of Chinese contemporary art just eight months

after buying it.

Sotheby's will auction 108 lots of paintings, photography, calligraphy

and sculpture, called the Estella Collection, valued at as much as $12

million, on April 9 in Hong Kong, the auction house said.

The collection includes artists such as Cai Guo-Qiang, Ai Weiwei, who

helped design Beijing's Olympic stadium, and Zhang Xiaogang, whose

buyers include Charles Saatchi and Don Marron, chairman of Lightyear

Capital LLC.

Beijing Olympic Stadium by Ai Wei Wei

The Estella sale shows how fast collectors are trading one of the

hottest segments of the market, where prices have shot up as much as

15 times in the past three or four years as new millionaires started

buying.

“We thought it was a good cross-section of art,” Acquavella said in

a telephone interview.

The escalation in prices may be stalling under pressure from the

roiling credit markets and the start of the U.S. recession. At

Sotheby's in New York two weeks ago, the total value of Asian

contemporary art sold shrank for the first time since spring 2006.

Buyers passed up a $700,000 gunpowder drawing by Cai, who currently

has an exhibition at Manhattan's Guggenheim Museum.

Financial Stake

Sotheby's has a financial stake in all or part of the collection,

according to the auction catalog. The auction house sometimes makes

advances to sellers or buys art before reoffering it in the saleroom,

according to regulatory filings. A spokeswoman declined to say if

Sotheby's owned 100 percent of the collection, or less.

A second sale from the Estella holding is scheduled for later this

year in New York.

The artworks were originally bought by dealer Michael Goedhuis, who

has galleries in New York and London, over three- and-a-half years for

clients, Goedhuis said in a phone interview. He sold the collection in

August at a ``substantial'' profit for the clients, he said.

One of the collection's highlights, Zhang's ``The Big Family No. 3''

(1995), has a high presale estimate of $3.47 million. The painting,

which depicts three pale, vacant-eyed youths, was exhibited at the

Venice Biennale in 1995. It appreciated more than 15 times in the

three-and-a-half years that Estella held it, Goedhuis said. Zhang's

works generally were rising in value at that rate, according to his

calculations.

Price Was Right

 
Among other works from the Estella collection for sale in April are a

2005 Cai gunpowder drawing, with an estimated range of $512,800 to

$641,000 and Zeng Fanzhi's 2005 painting, “Chairman Mao with Us,”

which shows China's former leader flanked by two kids. It has a high

estimate of $555,000.

Some Asian collectors criticized the wholesale approach to selling Chinese art.

“Moves like that signal the works are like commodities, prized for

little more than their monetary value,” said Beijing- based collector

of Chinese contemporary art Guan Yi, who owns about 800 works.

Acquavella, whose gallery has recently taken on Zeng, said his reason

for putting the Estella collection up for sale was simple.

“I am buying things for selling,” he said. “The price was right.”