On the way home from the art market I walked over to the culture park, where the Green Ram Temple is. I walked past the tea houses and heard a woman with a microphone giving what I thought was a lecture. I was tired from walking so I stopped to try and figure out what her speech was about. She had a Chinese painting on display and was reading its title and telling us how old it was. She was asking the audience questions, I thought about the painting. Then she rolled it up and gave it to someone, and I realized that I was at an art auction.
I went up to look at a couple of them more closely – they were mostly simply done watercolours. A few of them had really nice brush work. This ‘five tiger’, which I thought was one of the better ones, went for slightly over 100 kuai.
I bid on one of the few smaller framed pictures. The auctioneer was asking for fifteen and I put up my hand. She seemed startled and asked what my bid was. I said fifteen in Chinese, and her assistant repeated it and all my subsequent Chinese bids in English. I ended up paying twenty four kuai for it, about 3.70.
The art auction crowd:
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