David Hockney Sold 98 Times at Korean Auction. Not One Was a Painting.
Every David Hockney that sold at Korean auction from 2022 to 2026 was an edition or a book. One My Window print sold thirteen times, and its price moved seven months before he died.
Six weeks after David Hockney died, Seoul Auction took his largest work out of its July sale before the bidding opened. It was a photographic drawing more than two metres on each side, the first of that scale offered at a Korean auction, with a starting price of about $373,000. Newsis reported that the consignor withdrew it because they expected no one to bid.
Hockney died in London on 11 June 2026, at 88. In 2018 his Portrait of an Artist (Pool with Two Figures) sold at Christie's New York for $90,312,500, then the highest price paid at auction for a living artist. So it would be natural to expect his death to show up in Korean results. So far it has not.
| Date | House | Work | Medium | Estimate | Result |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| 23 Jun 2026 | Seoul Auction | The Atelier, March 17th 2009, 2009 | Inkjet printed computer drawing and photo collage on paper, edition size not confirmed | $22,374 to $59,663 | $29,832 |
| 21 Jul 2026 | Seoul Auction | Focus Moving, large version, 2018 | Photographic drawing printed on paper, mounted on Dibond, edition size not confirmed | Not published | Withdrawn |
| 22 Jul 2026 | K Auction | My Window, No. 778, 2011 | iPad drawing, inkjet print, edition of 250 | Not recorded | $33,561 |
| 22 Jul 2026 | Seoul Auction | A Bigger Book, 2016 | Book, signed edition of 9,000 | Not recorded | $2,088 |
| 19 Aug 2026 | Seoul Auction | A Bigger Book, 2016 | Book, signed edition of 9,000, with bookstand and chronology volume | Not recorded | $2,685 |
| 25 Aug 2026 | Seoul Auction | 2nd March 2021, A Closer Look at Some Tulips, 2021 | iPad drawing printed on paper, edition of 50 | $70,850 to $96,953 | $70,850 |
The first Hockney to come up in Korea after his death sold in the lower part of its range. The tulips, the most expensive lot since, hammered exactly on the low estimate. Five sales and one withdrawal is not enough to call a direction, but there is nothing here that looks like a rush.
London looked different. On 25 June Christie's sold one of his iPad prints, The Arrival of Spring in Woldgate, East Yorkshire in 2011 - 30 April, for $378,358, 1.86 times its high estimate.
Ninety-eight lots and not one painting
I pulled every Hockney that sold at a Korean auction from January 2022 to August 2026: 98 lots, about $5.07 million in total. Two duplicate entries in the database have been removed.
Not one of the 98 is a unique work. No canvas, no drawing by hand. Every lot is an edition, a book, or a poster.
| Type | Lots | Median | Range |
|---|---|---|---|
| Books, catalogues, posters | 16 | $1,678 | $298 to $9,397 |
| Etchings, lithographs, photocopier prints | 12 | $12,306 | $1,566 to $313,232 |
| Book with a signed print (My Window and others) | 35 | $22,374 | $14,170 to $33,561 |
| Photographic drawings | 13 | $59,663 | $40,273 to $126,784 |
| Large iPad drawings printed on paper | 17 | $96,953 | $28,340 to $581,716 |
| Computer drawings, inkjet printed | 5 | $29,832 | $14,916 to $357,979 |
A median across all of it would describe nothing. The $1,678 object is a signed book and the $96,953 object is a large print from an edition of 25, and the name on both is the only thing they share.
The book category is mostly A Bigger Book, the 498-page monograph Taschen published in 2016, which Hockney signed in a run of 9,000. The photocopier prints are his Home Made Prints of 1986, made by feeding sheets back through office colour copiers he had installed in his studio, one colour at a time. The $313,232 in that row is a complete set of A Rake's Progress, the sixteen etchings he made as a student at the Royal College of Art and published in 1963 in an edition of 50. It is sixteen prints sold as one lot, not one print.
The photographic drawings are studio pictures assembled from hundreds of photographs, a metre or two across. The large iPad prints are drawings he made on the tablet and had printed at a scale close to a painting: The Arrival of Spring in Woldgate, from the East Yorkshire spring of 2011, and The Yosemite Suite from 2010. Both are editions of 25 in their standard size.
Edition size comes before price
My Window is a Taschen book of 120 drawings Hockney made on an iPhone and an iPad, looking out of his window in Yorkshire. Taschen issued it in four Art Editions of 250 copies, each with a different signed print: No. 535, No. 281, No. 610 and No. 778. That makes 1,000 signed prints across four images, and 31 of the 98 Korean lots are one of them.
A Bigger Book works the same way. Beside the 9,000 signed copies there are four Art Editions of 250, each with an iPad print. The two can appear under the same title in a sale record and sit $20,000 apart.
One print, thirteen sales
Editions have an advantage for anyone reading prices: the same image keeps coming back. Comparing two different paintings, you cannot tell whether the price moved or a bigger picture turned up. Comparing two sheets from one edition, you can.
The K-artmarket records used here do not say which sheet was sold, so from those records alone a resale of one sheet looks exactly like the sale of another. Each print carries its number in pencil in the lower margin, and I read it off the auction plates.
The My Window edition with print No. 778, copies 751 to 1,000, sold thirteen times at Seoul Auction and K Auction in four and a half years.
| Sale | House | Sheet | Price |
|---|---|---|---|
| Mar 2022 | Seoul Auction | 18/250 | $22,374 |
| Jun 2022 | K Auction | 178/250 | $19,391 |
| Feb 2023 | Seoul Auction | 14/250 | $22,374 |
| Apr 2023 | K Auction | Unreadable | $23,865 |
| May 2023 | K Auction | Unreadable | $22,374 |
| Aug 2023 | K Auction | Unreadable | $20,882 |
| Aug 2023 | Seoul Auction | 53 or 55/250 | $21,628 |
| Feb 2025 | K Auction | 136/250 | $22,374 |
| Apr 2025 | K Auction | 194/250 | $22,374 |
| Nov 2025 | K Auction | 212/250 | $32,815 |
| Jan 2026 | Seoul Auction | 187/250 | $29,832 |
| Apr 2026 | Seoul Auction | 210/250 | $26,848 |
| Jul 2026 | K Auction | 159 or 199/250 | $33,561 |
The first nine sales, to April 2025, all fell between $19,391 and $23,865. The four since November 2025 fell between $26,848 and $33,561.
Every number I could read is different, and the two blurred ones do not match any other whichever way they are read. This is ten sheets, not one sheet changing hands, so it is a price series for one image rather than one print gaining value. Three K Auction plates from 2023 are too small to read.
The other editions moved the same way. No. 281 sold for $21,628 to $26,848 in 2022 and 2023, then twice at $29,832 on consecutive days in December 2025, once in each house. No. 610 went from $14,170 to $19,391 in 2022 and 2023 to $23,119 in March 2026.
The step up came in November 2025, seven months before Hockney died. Only one sale of No. 778 has happened since his death.
There is a gap I could not close. K Auction sometimes lists the same work with "with Art Edition Book" in the title and sometimes without. From the record alone I cannot tell whether a given lot was the print with its book or the print on its own, and a print without its book is a different thing to buy.
Same drawing, different sheet
The Arrival of Spring in Woldgate is easier to read in two steps.
First, each date is a different picture. From January 2011 into the spring, Hockney drew the same lane at Woldgate in East Yorkshire on his iPad over many days, and the date of the drawing is its title. 19 February and 24 April are different drawings: the February one is a lane under bare branches, the April one a wood coming into leaf with a cut tree stump in front.
Second, each picture was printed many times. Every drawing was printed on paper as an edition of 25, and each sheet was numbered. The 19 February sheet that sold at K Auction in 2022 is number 19; the one Sotheby's sold in 2025 is number 15. Geist lists a version in an edition of 10 as well. Everything that has sold in Korea, and at Sotheby's, is the edition of 25 on a sheet of about 140x105cm.
So prices in this series have to be compared date for date. Two dates have now sold twice in Korea, and I compared the plates to make sure each pair is the same drawing.
The 19 February drawing went from $126,784 to $320,690 in three years and seven months. The 24 April drawing went from $96,953 in November 2024 to $156,616 in September 2025.
Here the plates are less helpful. The 2022 sheet of 19 February is number 19 and the 2024 sheet of 24 April is number 8, but I could not read the number on either later sale, so I cannot say whether these are different sheets. The 24 April pair came back to the same house ten months apart, and it may be the same sheet.
London has paid far more for this series, once. On 17 October 2025 Sotheby's London sold seventeen sheets from a single collection in a sale of nothing else, and HENI's summary of the results records every one of them selling above its high estimate. The top lot was 19 February: the same drawing, number 15 of 25, on the same size of sheet as the Korean records. Sotheby's lot page put the estimate at $162,502 to $243,752. It sold for $1,031,885.
That figure is not what London pays. Bonhams in London sold another sheet of 19 February, number 17 of 25 on the same size of sheet, in December 2023 for $146,725, according to Geist's price history for the series. Same image, same city, seven times apart. In the Sotheby's sale itself, 24 April made $206,377; a month earlier Seoul Auction had sold a sheet of 24 April for $156,616, about $188,000 once the buyer's premium is added. And 14 May went the other way: $119,439 at Christie's Online in October 2024, about $223,000 with premium at K Auction in January 2025.
What separated the prices was the sale, not the city. MyArtBroker puts the October jump down to the unusual concentration of works from one collection. Against an ordinary sale, the March 2026 Seoul result for 19 February, $320,690 or about $384,000 with premium, sits close to the $378,358 that 30 April made at Christie's London in June.
These are auction results and nothing more. I could not see a condition report for any of these sheets, and on a print this size, fading or a crease moves the price.
What did not move
Not everything followed the iPad prints.
| Work | Medium | First sale | Later sale |
|---|---|---|---|
| The Atelier, March 17th 2009 | Inkjet printed computer drawing and photo collage | $14,916, Jan 2023 | $29,832, Jun 2026 |
| The Red Table | Photographic drawing print | $40,273, Aug 2023 | $41,764, Feb 2025 |
| Focus Moving, 115x89cm | Photographic drawing print, edition of 25 | $41,018, Jul 2023 | $46,985, Jun 2025 |
| Diptychon | Home Made Print, made on a colour photocopier | $9,322, Feb 2024 | $10,441, Feb 2025 |
| Portrait of Mother I | Lithograph | $13,424, Jan 2023 | $22,374, Aug 2023, then $11,187, Apr 2024 |
The digital work, drawn on an iPad or a computer, rose. The photographic drawings stayed roughly where they were. The lithograph of his mother went up and came back down within fifteen months, which is what a thin market for one print looks like.
Where the money sits
| Price | Work | Edition | Sale |
|---|---|---|---|
| $581,716 | 30th May 2021, From the Studio | Not confirmed | Seoul Auction, Mar 2026 |
| $357,979 | Less Trees Near Warter | 15 | K Auction, Nov 2025 |
| $320,690 | The Arrival of Spring in Woldgate - 19 February | 25 | Seoul Auction, Mar 2026 |
| $313,232 | A Rake's Progress, set of 16 | 50 | Seoul Auction, Nov 2023 |
| $275,942 | The Arrival of Spring in Woldgate - 23 February | 25 | Seoul Auction, Oct 2025 |
| $193,905 | The Arrival of Spring in Woldgate - 14 May | 25 | K Auction, Jan 2025 |
| $156,616 | The Arrival of Spring in Woldgate - 24 April | 25 | Seoul Auction, Sep 2025 |
The top ten lots account for 51 percent of the $5.07 million. The other 88 are mostly My Window prints around $22,000 and books at a few thousand.
Six of those seven sold in 2025 or later. On 31 March 2026 a single Seoul Auction sale took three Hockneys for $925,525 between them, ten weeks before he died.
The paintings are sold elsewhere
What drives Hockney's auction record is painting, and paintings do not come to Korean sales.
Two weeks after his death, Sotheby's London sold Two Chairs and a Wooden Spoon, July 1988 for $2,930,446, 1.20 times its high estimate of $2,437,524. On the same day Christie's Woldgate print made 1.86 times. Going by those two lots alone, the extra money after his death went to the cheaper edition, not the painting.
The Korean record's highest figure, $581,716, is a print. In Korea, a Hockney at auction means a Hockney edition.
Who he was
Hockney was born in Bradford in 1937 and studied at the Royal College of Art in London from 1959 to 1962. He moved to Los Angeles in 1964, the move behind the swimming pool paintings. From the 2000s he went back to East Yorkshire as a subject, and from 2009 and 2010 he drew on an iPhone and then an iPad. Almost everything in the Korean record comes from that period or after.
Pace Gallery represented him from 2008. His museum retrospectives ran at the Los Angeles County Museum of Art in 1988, travelling to the Metropolitan Museum of Art and the Tate; at Tate Britain in 2017, travelling to the Centre Pompidou and the Met; and at the Fondation Louis Vuitton in Paris in 2025, with more than 400 works. In Korea, the Seoul Museum of Art showed 133 paintings, drawings and prints from the Tate's collection from March to August 2019.
What the record cannot tell you
The data starts in January 2022, when K-artmarket's coverage begins. Anything that sold in Korea before that is not here.
It only records sales. A Hockney that was offered and did not sell leaves no trace, and the large Focus Moving is known only because a newspaper reported its withdrawal.
Two rows were removed as duplicates. The October 2025 Woldgate at $275,942 appeared twice; the preview for that sale lists one Hockney, so one row went. The September 2025 Woldgate at $156,616 appeared twice in the same way and was treated the same, but I could not confirm how many Hockneys that sale offered.
Estimates exist for two of the 98 lots. For almost everything else there is no way to say whether a price beat expectations or fell short of them.
I could not confirm the edition size of three works: The Atelier, March 17th 2009, the large Focus Moving, and 30th May 2021, From the Studio. The Atelier plate has a number pencilled in the margin, but the image is too small to read it.
What to check before bidding
Start with which edition it is. My Window comes in four Art Editions, each with a different signed print, and the print changes the price even though the book is the same. In 2022 and 2023 the edition with No. 610 sold for $14,170 to $19,391, and the one with No. 778 for $19,391 to $23,865. A Bigger Book is two different objects under one title: the signed copy, one of 9,000, sold for $2,088 to $9,397, and the Art Edition with a print sold for $25,357 to $26,848, close to ten times as much.
Read the medium and the edition line, not just the title. There are two works called Focus Moving. One is a 2018 acrylic painting on canvas, and there is only one of it. The other is the photographic drawing made from hundreds of photographs of the studio with that painting on the wall, and its 115x89cm version is an edition of 25. Everything that has come up in Korea is the second kind. With Woldgate, a different date is a different picture.
Look for the edition number and for the book. The number is pencilled in the margin of the print and appears in the auction house's catalogue entry, but K-artmarket does not record it, so tracing earlier sales of the same sheet means going back to the catalogues or the plates. An Art Edition is a book and a print together, and sale titles sometimes mention the book and sometimes leave it out.
Use recent sales of the same edition as the yardstick rather than the estimate. My Window No. 778 sold thirteen times in four and a half years, which is a better guide than an estimate that was published for only two of the 98 Korean lots.
Check what kind of sale a foreign result came from. The same 19 February made $146,725 at Bonhams in 2023 and $1,031,885 in Sotheby's single-collection sale in 2025. Taking one record as the going rate misreads the market.
Ask for a condition report and the provenance. These are large sheets of paper, and fading, creases and stains do not show in an auction plate. The same image can sell for different money depending on its condition and whose collection it came from.
Budget for the premium. The Korean prices in this article are hammer prices. At Seoul Auction's Korean sales the buyer pays a further 18 percent, plus VAT on that fee, so a work hammered at $320,690 costs about $384,000. K Auction's rate varies from sale to sale.
Auction data from K-artmarket, 12 January 2022 to 25 August 2026, retrieved 11 September 2026. Korean prices are hammer prices, buyer's premium excluded, converted at 1,341 won to the dollar (rate of 9 September 2026). Sotheby's and Christie's figures include buyer's premium, converted from sterling at 1.354 dollars to the pound. Estimates for The Atelier from Aju News, withdrawal of Focus Moving from Newsis, Sotheby's October 2025 results from Sotheby's and HENI, other Woldgate results from Geist, Bonhams and MyArtBroker, biography and exhibition history from Pace Gallery, edition sizes from Taschen and dealer catalogue entries, Seoul Auction's buyer's premium from its auction guide, retrieved 11 September 2026.