India Surges Ahead as Asia’s Art Market Splinters

The article

Asia’s fine art auction market generated $2.2 billion in total sales in 2025, down sharply from its $5.4 billion peak in 2021. Meanwhile, lot volume has held steady at roughly 61,000 works sold per year, according to the Artnet Price Database , suggesting that the market is repricing, even as collectors remain active. The average hammer price has more than halved, from $81,000 to $36,000, since 2021.

Asia’s five major regions—China, India, Japan, Korea, and Southeast Asia—have also splintered into distinct market trajectories, with price disparities now at their widest point in a decade.

As the market for South Asian art surges , India has emerged as the standout performer on the continent, with a median hammer price of $10,864 in 2025 and a sell-through rate of 89 percent—the highest across the five regions. The Mumbai-based auction house AstaGuru said that it grew its revenue by 138 percent between fiscal years 2023–24 and 2025–26. It just held its first collectibles auction at its new London outpost last week.

The South Asia boom is reverberating worldwide: Christie’s New York broke records last year with the $13.4 million sale of a work by modernist M.F. Husain , and the auction house will hold its first London sale of South Asian modern and contemporary art in seven years on June 11.

Given China’s real estate downturn and broader geopolitical instability, its market has unsurprisingly softened after a broadly stable decade, and its price index—a measure of how median sale prices have shifted relative to a 2016 baseline—has dropped 37 percent. South Korea’s secondary market has had the most dramatic arc: it rose 26 percent above 2016 levels in 2021, followed by an 88 percent crash one year later.

Japan, for its part, has had a slow decline, down 50 percent since 2016. Southeast Asia remains the quietest market, though emerging signals around female artists are drawing attention, according to Artnet’s analytics.

Read the argument alongside market data