Hannah Beech:

Throughout Asia’s developing nations, once penniless painters are getting used to this most unexpected emotion. The region’s contemporary-art market has never been so hot. Last year, a collection of dreamlike portraits and landscapes by China’s Zhang Xiaogang raked in just over $24 million — more than British enfant terrible Damien Hirst made in 2006. In March, a sale of modern Indian art in New York City raised a record $15 million, including just under $800,000 for Captives, a stark evocation of desiccated torsos by New Delhi–born Rameshwar Broota. Two months later, an auction in London elicited $1.42 million for a Tantric-inspired oil painting by India’s Syed Haider Raza. Even in Vietnam, idyllic rural scenes coated in the country’s distinctive lacquer that sold for a few hundred dollars a few years ago are now selling for 10 times that. A gouache-and-ink painting by Vietnamese post-impressionist Le Pho, whose work is part of the permanent exhibition at the Modern Art Museum in Paris, captured nearly $250,000 at a Singapore sale. Overall, leading auction houses Sotheby’s and Christie’s auctioned $190 million in contemporary Asian art last year, compared to $22 million just two years before. “This is just the beginning,” says Swiss art dealer Pierre Huber, who in September oversaw a debut contemporary Asian art fair in Shanghai. “For so long, people did not know about Asian art. But now the world is turning to Asia, and what they see is amazing.”