The city-state’s five-year-old Art HK fair is also attracting an increasingly international crop of dealers and collectors, and was recently purchased by Swiss behemoth Art Basel. While galleries from the West report varying degrees of success there, sales-wise, most see continued participation as an investment, even despite some hiccups this year—there were rippling concerns over a storage company that had customs problems and some attendees attributed the fact that certain mainland Chinese collectors didn’t show up to the fact that the fair did not coincide with the season’s auctions.

Lehmann Maupin, which made seven sales on the fair’s final day alone, has participated in Art HK for the past three years, using its booth to show its Asian artists, like the Japanese artist known as Mr., as well as Lee Bul and Do Ho Suh, but also to open the door for their Western artists—to, as Mr. Maupin put it, “educate and communicate.” This year they devoted a quarter of the booth to Austrian artist Erwin Wurm, who recently had a solo exhibition at the Ullens Center in Beijing. “That was really successful,” said Mr. Maupin, “because a certain percentage of the audience had either seen it or heard about it.”