A 1939 silk painting by Vu Cao Dam sets a Vietnamese auction record

Picture five women seated in a garden, painted on silk in 1939 by Vu Cao Dam, a Hanoi-born artist living in Paris. The work is listed as Conversation d'élégantes au jardin. Its estimate (the price range expected before a sale) was 8,000,000 to 19,600,000 Hong Kong dollars. It went into the Sotheby's evening sale in Hong Kong on 28 September 2026.

Fourteen bids came in, and the price reached 28,960,000 Hong Kong dollars, about 3,764,800 United States dollars by the house's own count. That is nearly half as much again as the top of the estimate. The old Vietnamese record was 24,400,000 Hong Kong dollars, paid in 2021 for Mai Trung Thu's Portrait of Mademoiselle Phuong, Viet Nam News reported.

The painting

It is painted in ink and gouache on silk and measures 85.6 by 114.5 centimetres, the largest multi-figure silk composition known from the artist, according to Sotheby's. Silk stayed his main medium until 1951. The sale notes call the picture the elegant pinnacle of his acclaimed silk period.

The five women resemble the family photographs the artist carried from Vietnam, the house suggests. The mood is nostalgia and affection for relatives and friends. Those people were becoming harder to reach in the years before World War II. His son, Michel Vu, has called the work one of the high points of his father's career, Viet Nam News reported.

A long way past the old record

HENI tracks auction results in United States dollars and puts the sale at 3.69 million. The artist's previous record was 1.04 million dollars, paid at Christie's in Hong Kong in December 2020 for Femmes au bain. That is a rise of 2.65 million dollars, or 250%, by its count.

What else sold in Hong Kong

The record did not arrive alone. The evening sales in Hong Kong totalled 738,554,400 Hong Kong dollars, about 96,012,072 United States dollars, Sotheby's says. That was up 35% on the previous season and the city's highest total in the category since autumn 2023. The top lot was Yoshitomo Nara's Present at 71,660,000 Hong Kong dollars, and Li Hei Di and Hu Xiaoyuan set new auction records.

A single-artist sale, The Foujita Lexicon, was the first of its kind for the house in Asia. Every lot sold, for 67,224,000 Hong Kong dollars. Across the whole Hong Kong series the house took 956 million Hong Kong dollars, or 124 million United States dollars, its best total since autumn 2023. Other Vietnamese lots did well too: Tran Luu Hau's Park made 2,816,000 Hong Kong dollars, more than twice its high estimate, Viet Nam News noted.

How to read a result

An auction house shows an estimate before the sale and a price after it, and the gap between the two is the simplest measure of demand. Here the price beat the top estimate by about 9.4 million Hong Kong dollars. Fourteen bids means the figure climbed step by step rather than in one leap. Viet Nam News read the night as a sign that demand for Vietnamese modern art now reaches beyond a few well-known names.

Our view

We think the work sold on scale and story as much as rarity, going by the notes Sotheby's published. One strong evening is one data point. We would wait for the next Vietnamese lot before calling a trend. The figures are the house's own, compared as listed, with two outside reports alongside.

I checked the maths twice and still lost count of the zeros.

What do you think?