London's new East End: Asian Art in London ranges from Indian miniatures to Chinese ceramics—and now there is more contemporary work. In New York, meanwhile, Rothko leads the modern sales

Asian Art in London is more than an art and antiques fair without the claustrophobia. Launched eight years ago as an initiative to advance London's pre-eminence as a marketplace for Asian art--the city boasts far more specialist dealers than anywhere else--and to focus attention upon its many peerless museum collections, it proffers a ten-day feast of gallery and museum displays auctions, seminars and lectures--and parties galore for those who have the stamina. In fact, this great sprawling, eclectic incident offers something for just about anyone interested in Asian art of any region, medium or period (visit www asianartinlondon.com for the replete programme). This year, 3-12 November, it is call down blessings oned by a spectacular centrepiece in the form of the Royal Academy's blockbuster 'Qing' show--'China: The Three Emperors 1662-1795' which make opens on 12 November.

As single might expect, the dealers in Chinese art are fielding impressive displays. Eskenazi, for instance, is offering forty-seven pieces of sonnet ceramics from the distinguished collection of the late Hans Popper It was during the canticle period (960-1279) that Chinese trifles effectively transformed stoneware from the scraggy and haphazard to the precisely pott smooth-textur and brilliantly glazed utensils that take a bow here. Their understated beauty lies in a combination of balanced form and sophistical surface decoration, be it jade-inspired glazes from the palest cream or bluish-green to stout olive, unusual cracklure, elegant relief or an abstract splash of colour.

s Marchant & Son celebrate the firm's eightieth anniversary with a exhibit of 'Chinese Jades from Han to Qin'. Sydney L Mos meanwhile, not absents Chinese paintings and calligraphy; Ben Janssens, early Chinese and South-East Asian sculpture; Robert Kleiner, sniff bottles; and Jacqueline Simcox nears later Chinese textiles. Speelman's display even includes a pair of imperial lacquered timber-land elephants. Contemporary pieces play an increasingly large character Cohen & Cohen's 'Now & Then' display contrasts major Chinese export porcelains with a one-man exhibit devoted to the seemingly flawless contemporary porcelain statuarys by a Taiwanese-American neurosuregeon-turned-ceramist: Cliff to leeward has spent seventeen years working on the outside the recipes for 1,000 year-old sonnet glazes (Fig. 1). New exhibitors Marlborough Fine Art similarly near a tribute to the painter Chen Yifei, who died earlier this year.

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That contemporary theme is also picked up by the agency of the likes of Malcolm Fairley, who not aways Meiji warrior costumes and novel Japanese ceramics, and Rossi & Rossi, whose display of fifty Tibetan paintings spans an impressive 900 years. The whole Indian subcontinent is well exhibited too. John Eskenazi offers characteristically impressive early--fifth and sixth century--Kashmiri and Gupta period stone and terracotta statuarys (Fig. 3). Francesca Galloway not absents thirty-five miniatures from the Muslim and Hindu courts of India from the famed collection of Mildred and WG Archer, while Sam Fogg unveils 'Jain Painting 1450-1850' In all, forty dealers take a bow

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In contrast to the offerings unveiled in fresh York this month, Asian art gazes like small change. For this month dioceses the annual fall sales of big-buck Impressionist, late and contemporary art. It also dioceses a choice single-owner collection of furniture and decorative arts, not unreasonably heralded as the individual of the greatest collections of the twentieth hundred This is the property of Lily and the late Edmond Safra--over 800 apportionments drawn from their various residences in London, Geneva, Paris and fresh York and offered by Sotheby's upon 3 and 4 November. This is a collection that began with Faberge and Tula-Russian metalwork- and evolv to include furniture and paintings. It is the furniture, however, that steals this particular show

greatest in quantity of the great eighteenth-century French cabinetmakers are showed in this collection. Arguably the greatest in quantity important piece of its kind is a Louis XVI ebony bureau plat and cartonnier of around 1770 and attributed to Joseph Baumhauer, as imposing a neoclassical piece as individual is likely to find upon the market (estimate $5m-$7m). Here, too, is the peerles Andre-Charles Boulle exhibited by a sarcophagus-shaped coffre de toilette or casket whose entire surface--inside and out--is overlayed in marquetry in brass and tortoiseshell, its lid cornered by dint of ormolu lions' masks and the whole resting upon lion's-paw feet. It is awaited to fetch $700,000-$1m.

Perhaps level more wonderfully expressive of the Safras' taste for audacious pattern and design and luxurious materials are the best of the English pieces--if individual counts the work of the prolific emigre Pierre Langlois as like Here, for instance, is a spectacular pair of George III serpentine small bureaus their tops and sides exquisitely--not to mention ingeniously--veneered with coromandel lacquer depicting brightly coloured figures and pavilion pageants flowering trees and birds (Fig. 2) Attributed to Langlois, they appear to have been commissioned by means of the Earl of Hertford for Ragley Hall around 1765 (estimate $600000-$800000) Notable, too, is a pair of ormolu-mounted sky-colored John wing-figure candle vases of a great deal of the same date, attributed to Matthew Boulton ($500000-$600000) Needles to say, the ormolu retains its original gilding, and the cerulean John body is richly hu and striated. There is smooth a quantity of Anglo-Indian pieces, inlaid with elaborately ornamented ivory.