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Christie's to Open New Hong Kong HQ, Sees Growing Asian Gen Z Interest

People watch the sunset over Victoria Harbour from a mountaintop in Hong Kong, China March 12, 2024. REUTERS/Tyrone Siu/File Photo
People watch the sunset over Victoria Harbour from a mountaintop in Hong Kong, China March 12, 2024. REUTERS/Tyrone Siu/File Photo
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Christie's to Open New Hong Kong HQ, Sees Growing Asian Gen Z Interest

People watch the sunset over Victoria Harbour from a mountaintop in Hong Kong, China March 12, 2024. REUTERS/Tyrone Siu/File Photo
People watch the sunset over Victoria Harbour from a mountaintop in Hong Kong, China March 12, 2024. REUTERS/Tyrone Siu/File Photo

Auction house Christie's hopes its new 50,000-sq-ft Asia headquarters that opens in Hong Kong in September will boost sales in 2024 amid increased interest across the region from a new generation of culturally astute millennials and younger.
Francis Belin, Christie's Asia-Pacific president, said he is "cautiously optimistic" about sales in the region as they try to engage with clients with the right products, right price and "exciting" events, Reuters said.
"We think we'll continue to see a market in 2024 which is not as booming as in 2021, but it's one that we can navigate if we do the right thing like we did in 2023," Belin told Reuters on Monday.
Total auction sales in the Asia-Pacific region eased 4% to $805 million last year from 2022, contributing 28% to the group's total. The sales decline compared to 43% and 9% drops in Americas and EMEA (Europe, Middle East, Africa), respectively.
Greater China accounted for 80% of Asia-Pacific sales.
Christie's also saw a surge in new buyers among millennials, born between 1981 to 1996, and Gen Z, born since 1997. It said Asia-Pacific accounted for 66% of its global millennial buyers last year, and more than half of them were from mainland China. Gen Z buyers from Asia-Pacific also more than doubled.
Belin said the auction house had started to see a surge in buying from young Chinese collectors for Chinese works of art and paintings over the past three years, rising from a few percentage points to up to 20% now, thanks to the company's increasingly use of Chinese social media apps such as Wechat and Xiaohongshu.
"So you find collectors at the depth of collecting, not just the hip, new artist, but that goes back to their cultural roots. That's meaningful for them and their culture," Belin said.
The market was slower last year because collectors were not convinced it was the best time to sell, he added.
The auction house will open its new Asia-Pacific headquarters at The Henderson, a new office tower in Hong Kong's prime Central district, in September. Christie's four floors in the building, which is being designed by Zaha Hadid Architects and developed by Henderson Land, will launch a three-month program of sales, exhibitions and events until November.
Belin shrugged off the impact of new national security laws that the Hong Kong government has imposed on the city, saying the financial hub still has a free flow of capital and rule of law.
He said he recognised the Hong Kong government's efforts in developing the city's arts and culture by hosting international events and building the West Kowloon Cultural District, which overlooks Victoria Harbour.
"Hong Kong will be able to rebuild itself; art and culture is part of it."
The Knight Frank Luxury Investment Index (KFLII), which tracks the performance of 10 popular investments of passion, showed that art was the best-performing luxury asset class in 2023, followed by jewelry, with prices rising 11% and 8%, respectively.
Knight Frank said in a report last week clients in Hong Kong allocate 19% of their investment portfolio to luxury investments, in line with the global average.

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Varieties

NASA Delivers Harsh Assessment of Botched Boeing Starliner Test Flight

NASA duo Butch Wilmore and Suni Williams were stuck on the ISS for nine months. Handout / NASA TV/AFP/File
NASA duo Butch Wilmore and Suni Williams were stuck on the ISS for nine months. Handout / NASA TV/AFP/File
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NASA Delivers Harsh Assessment of Botched Boeing Starliner Test Flight

NASA duo Butch Wilmore and Suni Williams were stuck on the ISS for nine months. Handout / NASA TV/AFP/File
NASA duo Butch Wilmore and Suni Williams were stuck on the ISS for nine months. Handout / NASA TV/AFP/File

NASA on Thursday blamed what it called engineering vulnerabilities in Boeing's Starliner spacecraft along with internal agency mistakes in a sharply critical report assessing a botched mission that left two astronauts stranded in space.

The US space agency labeled the 2024 test flight of the Starliner capsule a "Type A" mishap -- the same classification as the deadly Challenger and Columbia shuttle disasters -- a category that reflects the "potential for a significant mishap," it said.

The failures left a pair of NASA astronauts stranded aboard the International Space Station for nine months in a mission that captured global attention and became a political flashpoint.

"Starliner has design and engineering deficiencies that must be corrected, but the most troubling failure revealed by this investigation is not hardware. It's decision-making and leadership," said NASA administrator Jared Isaacman in a briefing.

"If left unchecked," he said, this mismanagement "could create a culture incompatible with human spaceflight."

The top space official said the investigation found that a concern for the reputation of Boeing's Starliner clouded an earlier internal probe into the incident.

"Programmatic advocacy exceeded reasonable bounds and place the mission, the crew and America's space program at risk in ways that were not fully understood at the time," Isaacman said.

He said Starliner currently "is less reliable for crew survival than other crewed vehicles" and that "NASA will not fly another crew on Starliner until technical causes are understood and corrected" and a problematic propulsion system is fixed.

But the administrator insisted that "NASA will continue to work with Boeing, as we do all of our partners that are undertaking test flights."

In a statement, Boeing said it has "made substantial progress on corrective actions for technical challenges we encountered and driven significant cultural changes across the team that directly align with the findings in the report."

- 'We failed them' -

Isaacman also had harsh words for internal conduct at NASA.

"We managed the contract. We accepted the vehicle, we launched the crew to space. We made decisions from docking through post-mission actions," he told journalists.

"A considerable portion of the responsibility and accountability rests here."

In June 2024 Butch Wilmore and Suni Williams embarked on what was meant to be an eight-to-14-day mission. But this turned into nine months after propulsion problems emerged in orbit and the Starliner spacecraft was deemed unfit to fly them back.

The ex-Navy pilots were reassigned to the NASA-SpaceX Crew-9 mission. A Dragon spacecraft flew to the ISS that September with a team of two, rather than the usual four, to make room for the stranded pair.

The duo, both now retired, were finally able to arrive home safely in March 2025.

"They have so much grace, and they're so competent, the two of them, and we failed them," NASA associate administrator Amit Kshatriya told Thursday's briefing.

"The agency failed them."

Kshatriya said the details of the report were "hard to hear" but that "transparency" was the only path forward.

"This is not about pointing fingers," he said. "It's about making sure that we are holding each other accountable."

Both Boeing and SpaceX were commissioned to handle missions to the ISS more than a decade ago.

Varieties

Abandoned Baby Monkey Finds Comfort in Stuffed Orangutan

A baby Japanese macaque named Punch sits next to a stuffed orangutan at Ichikawa City Zoo, in Ichikawa, Chiba Prefecture, Japan, February 19, 2026. REUTERS/Kim Kyung-Hoon
A baby Japanese macaque named Punch sits next to a stuffed orangutan at Ichikawa City Zoo, in Ichikawa, Chiba Prefecture, Japan, February 19, 2026. REUTERS/Kim Kyung-Hoon
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Abandoned Baby Monkey Finds Comfort in Stuffed Orangutan

A baby Japanese macaque named Punch sits next to a stuffed orangutan at Ichikawa City Zoo, in Ichikawa, Chiba Prefecture, Japan, February 19, 2026. REUTERS/Kim Kyung-Hoon
A baby Japanese macaque named Punch sits next to a stuffed orangutan at Ichikawa City Zoo, in Ichikawa, Chiba Prefecture, Japan, February 19, 2026. REUTERS/Kim Kyung-Hoon

At a zoo outside Tokyo, the monkey enclosure has become a must-see attraction thanks to an inseparable pair: Punch, a baby Japanese macaque, and his stuffed orangutan companion.

Punch's mother abandoned the macaque when he was born seven months ago at the Ichikawa City Zoo and when an onlooker noticed and alerted zookeepers, they swung into action.

Japanese baby macaques typically cling to their mothers to build muscle strength and for a ‌sense of security, ‌so Punch needed a swift intervention, zookeeper ‌Kosuke ⁠Shikano said. The keepers ⁠experimented with substitutes including rolled-up towels and other stuffed animals before settling on the orange, bug-eyed orangutan, sold by Swedish furniture brand IKEA.

“This stuffed animal has relatively long hair and several easy places to hold," Shikano said. "We thought that its resemblance to a monkey might help ⁠Punch integrate back into the troop later ‌on, and that’s why ‌we chose it."

Punch has rarely been seen without it since, ‌dragging the cuddly toy everywhere even though it is ‌bigger than him, and delighting fans who have flocked to the zoo since videos of the two went viral, Reuters reported.

“Seeing Punch on social media, abandoned by his parents but still trying ‌so hard, really moved me," said 26-year-old nurse Miyu Igarashi. "So when I got the ⁠chance to ⁠meet up with a friend today, I suggested we go see Punch together.”

Shikano thinks Punch's mother abandoned him because of the extreme heat in July when she gave birth.

Punch has had some differences with the other monkeys as he has tried to communicate with them, but zookeepers say that is part of the learning process and he is steadily integrating with the troop.

"I think there will come a day when he no longer needs his stuffed toy," Shikano said.

Varieties

Trump Says he’s Ordering Release of Data on UFOs, Aliens

US President Donald Trump speaks aboard Air Force One (AP)
US President Donald Trump speaks aboard Air Force One (AP)
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Trump Says he’s Ordering Release of Data on UFOs, Aliens

US President Donald Trump speaks aboard Air Force One (AP)
US President Donald Trump speaks aboard Air Force One (AP)

US President Donald Trump said on Thursday he is ordering federal agencies to begin “identifying and releasing” government files related to UFOs and aliens, a move sought for decades by some Americans.

“Based on the tremendous interest shown, I will be directing the Secretary of War, and other relevant Departments and Agencies, to begin the process of identifying and releasing Government files related to alien and extraterrestrial life, unidentified aerial phenomena (UAP), and unidentified flying objects (UFOs),” Trump posted on his Truth Social platform.

Trump claimed earlier Thursday that his predecessor, former President Barack Obama, made classified information public when he confirmed the existence of extraterrestrial life.

“He gave classified information. He's not supposed to be doing that,” he told reporters on Air Force One. “He made a big mistake.”

During an ⁠interview with podcast host Brian Tyler Cohen released ‌on Saturday, Obama was asked if aliens were real.

“They're real, but I haven't seen them, and they're not being kept in ... Area 51. There's no underground facility unless there's this enormous conspiracy and they hid it from the president of the United States,” Obama said.

Area ⁠51 is a classified Air Force facility in Nevada that fringe theorists have speculated holds alien bodies and a crashed spaceship. CIA archives released in 2013 said it was a test site for top-secret spy planes.

“I saw no evidence during my presidency that extraterrestrials have made contact with us. Really!” Obama said in an Instagram post on Sunday.

In the post, Obama explained his belief that aliens exist by saying the statistical odds of life beyond Earth were high because the universe is so ⁠vast. He added that the chances of extraterrestrial life visiting Earth were low given the distance.

Following his comments ⁠on Obama, Trump added that he had not seen evidence that aliens exist, saying, “I don't know ⁠if they're ⁠real or not.”