Chinese art takes long march home from US museums

Christie’s auctioneer Rupert Banner leans forward with practised showmanship as bidding stalls on a rare Yongzheng bowl near New York’s iconic Rockefeller Centre. He pauses as if willing offers from thin air, scanning dozens of in-person buyers and phone banks connecting with China, London, Texas.It will be a bad look if the frenzy abates for this delicate peach-decorated bowl highlighted on Christie’s glossy Chinese sale catalogue and online advertising. But bidding soon resumes with a realised price of US$2.05 million, the sale’s top porcelain result.The bowl is among over 100 items from the Art Institute of Chicago, part of a broader generational transition as rarefied relics amassed by 19th century American Gilded Age “robber barons” return to Chinese hands after gathering dust for more than a century in Western museums.Then it is the turn of lot 1032, an archaistic zun-form vase once owned by finance magnate Charles Schwab. “They’re off and running,” says Banner, before a Chinese man snags it for US$40,960.