ON 21ST JUNE, AT SOTHEBY’S IN LONDON, AN ANONYMOUS buyer paid for £9,652,000 for Damien Hirst’s 2002 pill cabinet, Lullaby Spring, making it the most expensive work by a living artist ever sold at an auction. While the sums of money being spent in the upper echelons of the contemporary art market have now become almost surreal, they have largely been focused on a small group of well-known Western artists. It was therefore notable that among the top lots in this same sale was Yue Minjun’s The Pope, a 1997 self-portrait of the artist as a grinning Innocent X. Selling for £2,148,000 to an anonymous buyer, it became the highest priced Chinese contemporary work ever sold at an auction, the latest reminder of the extent to which Chinese artists are now part of the mainstream of international contemporary art.

Things continued in a similar fashion on the following day at the auction house, Phillips de Pury, where another highly successful contemporary art auction culminated in the largest ever single owner collection of Chinese contemporary art to appear at auction, resulting in record prices for six Chinese artists. Alongside the likes of Andy Warhol and Jean Michel Basquiat, in the top ten were one of Zeng Fanzhi’s Hospital Series works which sold for £860,000, Yue Minjun’s Free and at Leisure Series No.12 which made £660,000, and one of Zhang Xiaogang’s iconic 1990s Bloodline portraits which sold for £580,000.

The sight of this growing coterie of Chinese artists keeping pace with the likes of Damien Hirst and other contemporary heavyweights makes the future all the more intriguing for Indian art which has also been experiencing its own boom with record prices and the burgeoning interest of everyone from auction houses to museum curators. However, beyond the predictable behaviour of the art world (the feeding and consuming frenzy), there are elemental differences in the ways in which contemporary art has evolved in these two very distinct Asian cultures, not least in the degree to which each has attracted and responded to interest from the international contemporary art world with its Western tastes and values.

So far, only one Indian artist – Subodh Gupta – has started to attract the kind of attention and prices made by top Chinese art stars. Although his work is yet to appear in the high profile international contemporary art auctions, the Bihar-born artist has not looked back since capturing the attention of the international art world in 2005 with prominent displays at the Venice Biennale and London’s Frieze Art Fair. He is now being snapped up by some of Europe’s biggest collectors. Bernard Arnault bought a giant metal bucket for €60,000 at Frieze, while, more recently, Christie’s owner, François Pinault bought Very Hungry God (2006), Gupta’s spectacular one-ton sculpture of a skull made of metal pots, commissioned for the Church of St. Bernard in Paris last October (and currently one of the highlights of the Venice Biennale dramatically positioned outside the exhibition of Pinault’s collection at the Palazzo Grassi until 11th November, 2007).

To many observers, the fact that Gupta’s success has yet to be replicated by any other Indian artist, simply reflects the freshness of the Indian contemporary art scene, which is only just starting to find its feet. “I think that there are at least another ten years to go before we see Indian art performing on the level Chinese art is now,” says Peter Osborne of the London-based gallery, Osborne Samuel.

Gupta’s experience, however, like that of some of the Chinese art stars, also shows how quickly the art world responds once momentum starts to gather. Conor Macklin of London’s Grosvenor Vadehra gallery, points to the case of Chintan Upadhyay as an example of how quickly an artist’s stock can rise. “In May, one of his works sold for £11,400 at Christie’s, London, while only a week later in Hong Kong, a similar one was bought by a Chinese dealer for $74,000.”

Despite these optimistic predictions, there are still many reasons why Indian contemporary art cannot be regarded as simply following the same path that has taken Chinese art to its present heights. While Chinese contemporary art has been cultivated and nurtured by Western collectors and dealers from an early stage, the milieu from which recent Indian art has sprung has been dominated almost exclusively by the money and tastes of resident and non-resident Indians. In both cases, this has affected the art, sometimes in subtle ways and sometimes less so.