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Experts Agree Chinese Porcelain’s Value Rests on Who Made It and For Whom

The market peaked, according to Christie's VP Vicki Paloympis, in 2011 when pieces were routinely selling for 10 times their estimates. In the years since, stability has returned to the category, with objects made specifically for the Imperial Court commanding the highest sums.

Each year in early September, the city’s art institutions and auction houses mount programming timed to coincide with Asia Week New York—a multi-day stretch of gallery presentations and museum shows during which the city’s major auction houses focus on Asian fine and decorative arts. High among the lots in Christie's two-part Important Chinese Art on September 17-18 is a rare three-century-old porcelain “bats and peaches” bowl, painted inside and out as you might expect with a high estimate of $600,000. But if you get outbid, there’s a lot more to buy, and not just at Christie’s, which alone will host four live auctions and two online auctions.

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Meanwhile, Sotheby’s Asia Week New York offering is the 230-lot live Chinese Art sale on September 16, while Bonhams is leaning into the theme with two online sales and three live auctions: Fine Chinese Ceramics and Works of Art, Fine Chinese Paintings and Calligraphy and Fine Japanese and Korean Art. Heritage is also opening its Fine & Decorative Asian Art Signature Auction on September 16, and Doyle’s two-part Asian Works of Art sale featuring works from the collection of Diane A. Nixon will open the same day.

In the Christie’s sale are 110 porcelain items deaccessioned from the Art Institute of Chicago, including the ‘bats and peaches’ bowl, which was produced during the Yongzheng period (1723 to 1735) of the Qing Dynasty (1644-1912), as well as consignments from private collectors. “The majority of these works were produced for domestic use and export,” Tao Wang, chair of Arts of Asia and curator of Chinese art at the Art Institute of Chicago, told Observer. With 1,400 Chinese ceramics in the Art Institute’s permanent holdings, refining the museum’s collection of Chinese fine and decorative art has been an ongoing process, according to Wang, who said that deaccessioning 110 is not even the largest number of objects they’ve let go of at once. In 2018, approximately 250 Chinese works of art were deaccessioned, and in 2025 an additional 100 works were sold. Money raised from this and from previous sales is “used exclusively for future acquisitions across the museum’s Asian collections—not limited to Chinese art—and for the direct care of the collection,” he added.

The market for Chinese porcelain is filled with highs and lows, largely driven in the past decade-and-a-half by Chinese buyers in what Vicki Paloympis, vice-president and head of the Chinese department at Christie’s New York, calls “Greater China” (the mainland, Hong Kong, Taiwan) and to a lesser extent western collectors and Chinese nationals living in the U.S. “I would say that the 1990s were the peak of American collecting of Chinese porcelain and pottery,” she told Observer, noting that New York collectors were collecting primarily Tang pottery—colorful tomb........

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