A brown-hued oil painting by the veteran Chinese artist Wang Huaiqing depicting the classic wooden beams and columns of a Chinese study fetched $974,000, the top lot in a weekend sale of Asian works that saw cautious bidding.

Mr. Wang’s “Sanwei Studio” emerged as the surprise star in Christie’s International’s auction of 20th-century and Contemporary Asian artworks in Hong Kong on Sunday that offered established names such as Yue Minjun and Zao Wou-ki, along with rising stars such as Hisashi Tenmyouya. “Sanwei,” which had a presale top estimate of $330,000, describes with linearity the school that the venerated Chinese author Lu Xun attended as a child. Yesterday’s auction of 432 works fetched more than $44 million, with 59 lots unsold.

“It’s a relatively quiet day,” a Beijing-based art dealer who attended the auction, Tian Kai, said. “People were looking for gems in a mixed selection of strong and mediocre works.”

About 200 bidders and bystanders attended yesterday evening’s Contemporary art sale, leaving most of the 700-odd seats empty. A woman in a dull-green crochet top dozed off at the back of the hall and woke up just in time to bid for her lot; a Taiwanese man with gelled hair, snug jeans, and a Louis Vuitton bag left the room in a huff after losing five straight lots.

Paintings by Chinese artists born in the late 1960s and 1970s are by far the best performers of Christie’s Asian art auctions. At its Saturday sale, the painter Zeng Fanzhi’s picture of masked figures wearing red scarves, “Mask Series 1996 No. 6,” sold for $9.6 million, the most for an Asian Contemporary artwork. A painting of the 1989 Tiananmen Square crackdown by Mr. Yue, known for his grinning men, sold for an artist record of $6.9 million.