Sotheby's has spotlighted the market ascent of Li Hei Di, the Chinese-born painter whose auction record has been broken four times in less than two years. In a reel posted this week, the auction house noted that the young artist keeps setting new benchmarks, with a dreamlike painting recently fetching a record price. The latest record came at Sotheby's Hong Kong on 28 September 2025, when There Was One Summer Returning Over and Over; There Was One Dawn I Grew Old Watching (2023) sold for HK$2.67 million ($342,824) after a five-minute bidding battle, more than doubling its presale high estimate. The result marked a 91 percent jump from the artist's previous high, set just six months earlier. That earlier record was Drifted Petals on Her Lifted Mound (2022), which sold for HK$1.4 million ($179,565) at Sotheby's Hong Kong in March 2025. Before that, Orange Swim (2021) set the bar at $155,100 at Phillips Hong Kong in November 2024, itself beating a $127,000 record from Phillips New York days earlier. Born in Shenyang in 1997, Li lives and works in London and is the youngest artist on Pace Gallery's roster, having joined the mega-gallery alongside representation by Michael Kohn Gallery in Los Angeles and Pippy Houldsworth in London. The artist's emotive, erotically charged canvases draw on sources ranging from Hong Kong director Tsui Hark's fantasy epic Green Snake to the artist's own explorations of intimacy and desire. Li has described identifying with the film's younger serpent spirit, and the same dreamlike ambiguity runs through paintings where figures dissolve into mystical reds, greens and yellows. The steep climb has made Li one of the most closely watched young painters at auction, with each sale resetting expectations for what the market will pay.