Budi Kustarto, showing his work for the first time in China, had barely finished hanging his oil paintings last week at the country's premier art fair when a group of Indonesian collectors snapped them up.``Ice Cream Cake,'' a 2008 oil painting depicting the Indonesian artist climbing out of a melting parfait, sold, together with a statue and three canvases, for up to $80,000 each. Compatriot Eko Nugroho sold six works at the China International Gallery Exposition and Thai artist Natee Utarit sold all five of his paintings.``We see the first sign of Beijing becoming an international place for buying art,'' said Soka Art Center's director Hsiao Fu-yuan, whose Taipei-based gallery represents the three Southeast Asian artists. ``Global collectors are flocking to Beijing to buy works by artists of South Korea, Japan and Southeast Asia. They're not just looking merely at Chinese art anymore.''The Beijing art fair, where 4 out of 5 of the 80 participating galleries hailed from outside mainland China, attracted an estimated 40,000 collectors to see 5,000 paintings, sculptures, photographs and installations. Soka sold $800,000 of art, contributing to the fair's tally of $40 million, 40 percent more than in 2007.``It's a great trend'' to see many galleries ``bringing young artists from all over Asia to show in China,'' said the fair's director Wang Yihan.Ice Cream Indicator``Ice cream conveys the speed that materialism is taking over our society,'' Kustarto said in Beijing. ``It's an image that many Chinese can relate to.'' Two weeks ago, his ``Tricycle Ice Cream'' sold at Sotheby's in Hong Kong for HK$847,500 ($108,777) including commission, four times the top estimate.artworkA monochrome ``Self Portrait'' by Chuck Close sold for $100,000 at Ethan Cohen Fine Arts. The New York-based gallery declined to name the buyer, saying only that he was a well-known Chinese artist.Damien Hirst's pencil sketch of ``For the Love of God,'' his $100 million diamond-and-platinum skull, was unsold at $400,000, possibly because it was displayed in an obscure corner of Ethan Cohen's booth.Two of Park Seo-bo's ``Ecriture'' paintings sold for $170,000 each at Wellside Gallery. Some galleries would not give out sales figures and all declined to identify buyers.``The caliber of collectors has risen this year, more than making up for the quantity of viewers, which has declined somewhat from 2007,'' said Soka's Hsiao, who attended the fair's four previous shows.`Leftovers' Left OverOuyang Chun, one of 33 young emerging Asian artists to showcase their works at CIGE, sold 83 of his 100 oil paintings at Gallery J.Chen. Zhu Yu, who switched from performances that used aborted fetuses to painting, didn't sell any of his ``Leftover'' food images at the show, according to Xin Gallery. His work did get a query from a Singaporean real estate executive, the gallery said.One of the most expensive sales at the four-day fair was the latest work by China's Zhou Chunya. ``Born Under the Peach Blossom,'' depicting a couple copulating under a tree, sold at My Humble House Art Gallery for 4 million yuan ($572,663) before the oil paint had fully dried.Zhou's ``Peach Blossoms in the Spring Breeze,'' depicting a couple having sex under a full bloom, may fetch between $421,100 and $631,600 when it goes on sale at Zhong Cheng Auctions on June 8 in Taipei, according to the auctioneer's estimate.artwork of Zhou chunya