$48m for a Chinese bowl you can’t put in the dishwasher

A bowl used for cleaning paint brushes has been bought at a Sotheby’s sale in Hong Kong for $48m.

Nicolas Chow with the $48m bowl. Picture: AFP

A small bowl used for cleaning paint brushes has been bought at a Sotheby’s sale in Hong Kong for $48 million, almost three times the expected price.

This world auction record for Chinese ceramics was paid on Tuesday by an anonymous ­bidder, concluding a 20-minute battle, for a blue-green glazed bowl just 13cm across.

It was used by a gentleman scholar — or possibly even the emperor himself, since it was commissioned by the court — for washing brushes he used for ­calligraphy or to paint in ink a thousand years ago.

The bowl was fired, with extraordinary skill, in a royal kiln at Ruzhou near the then capital of the Northern Song dynasty that is today’s Kaifeng, the capital of Henan province in central China.

It was made, with its fiendishly difficult “ice-crackle” pattern, in about the year 1100, during a mere 20 year production period of “Ru” — for Ruzhou — ware, the output of one of China’s five great kilns. The empire was then invaded and the dynasty overthrown.

This means that ceramics made there in that brief time of rare accomplishment have ­acquired extraordinary value. ­

Sotheby’s cited Zhou Hui, a collector, who writing in 1192 said “today it is very difficult to ­obtain” such items.

Fewer than 100 such items ­survive intact at all, almost all now in museums, with just four left in private hands.

Sotheby’s deputy Asia chairman Nicholas Chow described the bowl sold on Tuesday as the finest of the four, “near perfect and ravishing”.

Many poems have been ­written about these rare products, including that their colour resembles “the blue of the sky in a clearing among clouds after rain”.

The bowl was owned by ­Taiwanese entrepreneur Robert Tsao, who had placed it in his Le Cong Tang (Happy To Obey) ­collection.

In comparison, the most ­expensive Australian artistic product to have been sold at auction is Sidney Nolan’s First-Class Marksman, part of his Ned Kelly series, bought for $5.4m — ­followed by two works by Brett Whiteley, and two by John Brack.

Sotheby’s, in celebrating the sale, refers to the bowl’s understated aesthetics as “a quiet metaphor of Chinese philosophy”.

It failed to mention, however, whether it was dishwasher safe.