Liu Wei's Revolutionary Family sold for £242,730

Hollywood film director Oliver Stone, who recently completed the George W Bush biopic W, sold three contemporary Chinese paintings at Christie's in Hong Kong on Sunday for £2.9million. Stone will have realised a handsome profit as the paintings, including Liu Wei's Revolutionary Family, a portrait of the artist with his father which sold below estimate for £243,000, were bought in the early 1990s when contemporary Chinese art was barely a glimmer in the market's eye. The contemporary Asian art sale was otherwise a lacklustre event in which nearly half the lots went unsold. A much stronger result, from the same series of auctions, was posted in a sale of vintage wines in which nearly all the 240 lots found buyers.

•Along with property, art prices are being hit in the oil-rich Middle East. Bonhams's sale of modern and contemporary Arab, Iranian, Indian and Pakistani art in Dubai last week drummed up just $2.9million (nearly £2million) when at least $9million had been expected. The chief casualty was Mountain, an 8ft-high aluminium sculpture by former Turner Prize-winner Anish Kapoor, estimated at $1.2million to $2.6million, which did not sell.

•There has been some unwanted interest in EH Shepard's drawings of Winnie-the-Pooh, featured last week. One of Shepard's works for the Latin translation of the first Pooh book by AA Milne has been stolen from the annual illustrators' exhibition held by Mayfair dealer, Chris Beetles. A tiny oval portrait of the bear, inscribed "Latin Winnie ille Pu medallion" on the back, the work can still be seen on the gallery's website (chrisbeetles.com).

•A rich display of watercolours by JMW Turner is on view this week at Sotheby's and Christie's, where no fewer than 11 works are to be sold this month. At Sotheby's, prices range from £3,000, for an early study of a woodland waterfall, to £200,000 for a late, more dramatic view of the falls of Schaffhausen on the Rhine. Christie's has four British topographical views priced between £50,000 and £120,000. Also on view at Christie's will be five works from the collection of Chicago philanthropists William and Eleanor Wood Prince that are to be sold in New York in January. These are estimated to fetch between $30,000 for an early collaborative work made with Thomas Girtin, and $1.5million for a view of the Brunig Pass in Switzerland - one of the last watercolours he made for his patron John Ruskin.

•Prince Nikita Lobanov-Rostovsky, whose family fled Russia after the 1917 Revolution, bought what might have been the bargain of the week at Christie's Russian sale last week, when, for £13, he acquired a drawing of a horse-drawn vehicle by an unidentified artist that been estimated at £2,000 to £3,000. With no opening bids, the auctioneer then offered it for £10 and the prince, who sold his multi-million-pound collection of Russian theatre art back to Russia this year, seized his opportunity.