Sotheby's Hong Kong ended September on a high with its Modern and Contemporary Art Evening Auction on 28 September 2026, which totaled HK$671 million (US$87.3 million) and sold 46 of 52 lots for an 88% sell-through rate. Every work by a Japanese artist found a buyer, and the top three lots all went to Yoshitomo Nara and Yayoi Kusama, underscoring the continuing pull of Japanese postwar and contemporary art in Asia. Nara dominated the evening. Present, a 1994 canvas and the earliest of his full-figure defiant-child paintings, hammered at HK$58 million and sold for HK$71.7 million (US$9.3 million). At 180 by 150 centimeters, it ranks among the two largest knife-bearing canvases he made in the 1990s, painted in Cologne after he left Düsseldorf for a larger studio. His installation The Crated Room in Iceland / Drawing Room (2009), unseen in public for more than fifteen years, opened at HK$38 million and sold for HK$61.9 million. It was the work's auction debut. The evening's most-watched lot was Yayoi Kusama's Pumpkin (TWPOT), the first major pumpkin painting to appear at auction since the artist's death in August. The golden-orange canvas, distinguished by its rare palette, drew at least three bidders before hammering at HK$49 million and selling for HK$60.7 million (US$7.9 million), now the third-highest price for a Kusama pumpkin painting after Pumpkin (MBOK) and Pumpkin (LPASG). Other records fell: Pierre-Auguste Renoir's Paysage avec figures set an Asia auction record for the artist at HK$52.14 million (US$6.78 million), Marc Chagall's Les paysans exceeded expectations at HK$49.7 million, and Vu Cao Dam's Conversation d'élégantes au jardin set records for the artist and for any Vietnamese work at about HK$29 million. Tetsuya Ishida's Can't Fly Anymore surpassed its previous record at HK$12.2 million. One shadow on the evening: Mark Rothko's Untitled (Plum and Dark Brown), the sale's highest-estimate lot at HK$78 million, was withdrawn ahead of the auction.