World record for Vietnamese art: Vu Cao Dam’s “Conversation d’élégantes au jardin” sells for HK$28.9 million at Sotheby’s

HONG KONG — A historic night for Vietnamese art was marked on Sunday, September 28, 2026, at the Sotheby’s Hong Kong Modern and Contemporary evening auction: the work “Conversation d’élégantes au jardin” (1939) by painter Vu Cao Dam sold for HK$28.9 million (about US$3.76 million), after 14 bids pushed the price far above the initial estimate of HK$8–19.6 million.

The price sets a new auction record for Vu Cao Dam and the highest price ever paid in history for a Vietnamese work at auction — as Sotheby’s announced in the sale catalogue.

The work, ink and gouache on silk measuring 85.6 × 114.5 cm, signed and dated “’39” lower right, is the artist’s largest multi-figure composition on silk. It shows five elegantly dressed women in a garden — the culmination of his celebrated silk period, the artist’s main medium until 1951. The composition blends Sino-Vietnamese architecture with a European-formed compositional elegance, while the arrangement of the five seated figures recalls family photographs the artist had brought with him from Vietnam — a quiet nostalgia on the eve of World War II.

The work’s provenance is equally impressive: it comes from the Philip Ng collection in Singapore, was exhibited at the Singapore Art Museum in the exhibition “Visions and Enchantment: Southeast Asian Paintings” (2000) and was originally in Paris, at the Agence économique de l’Indochine, in 1939.

The same auction evening brought other strong results, according to The Value magazine: Renoir’s “Paysage avec figures” sold for HK$52.14 million, setting a record for Renoir in Asia, while Chagall’s “Les paysans” reached HK$49.7 million against an estimate of HK$22 million.

Vu Cao Dam (1908–2000), a Vietnamese painter based in France, is considered one of the pioneers of modern Vietnamese art. He studied at the Indochina School of Fine Arts in Hanoi, the institution where the first generation of modern Vietnamese artists was formed.