SINGAPORE — The mood was buoyant as the doors closed on the opening VIP night of Art Stage, with galleries seeing healthy sales with some six-figure star pieces snapped up.

Galerie Perrotin led the charge with the sale of Japanese A-list artist Takashi Murakami’s acrylic-on-canvas for $550,000. The painting, titled “And Then x 6 (Red Dots: The Superflat Method),” was sold to a Korean doctor. Other big-ticket items sold by the Paris- and Hong Kong-based gallery were a painting by Japanese Superflat artist Aya Takamo, called “Across Two Hundred Years We Send Our Blessings,” which went for $85,000, as well as a work by top Indian artist Bharti Kher at €55,000 ($73,4000).

Over at Sundaram Tagore Gallery, which has branches in New York, Hong Kong, and Singapore, a pair of waterfall paintings by Japanese master Hiroshi Senju was went home with an American collector based in Singapore for $415,000. 

On the Southeast Asian front, artists frin Indonesia, which was described by Art Stage fair director Lorenzo Rudolf in his pre-fair introductory comments as “the strongest country with the strongest art scene,” took the lead. Auction darling I Nyoman Masriadi proved his appeal once again at Singapore’s Gajah Gallery, with two works sold. “Peaceman,” a monumental painting depicting a man with a pig at his feet and a rooster at his shoulder, was sold to a Hong Kong collector for $350,000. A smaller piece, titled “Dirty Talk” and portraying a group of people gossiping, went for $200,000 to an Indonesian collector. Two smaller works by Sumatran-born artist Yunizar also sold for $24,000 each. 

At Nadi Gallery’s booth, Yogyakarta-based Handiwirman Saputra’s pair of turquoise acrylic-on-canvases sold for more than $150,000, while fellow Yogyakarta artist Yuli Prayitno’s painting-sculpture of a blackboard went for $21,000.

The Koreans also had a fair showing. Germany-based Korean artist SEO’s “Mobiler Raum im Garten IV,” a painting of two beagles on an elaborate carpet, went for €40,000 at Galerie Michael Schultz, which has branches in Berlin, Seoul and Beijing, while two editions of a so-called “skinny” sculpture titled “Lantern Man” by Yi Hwan Kwon sold for $42,000 each at Gana Art from Seoul.