HONG KONG -- A painting by a celebrated early 20th-century Chinese-American artist will be one of the most closely watched works up for auction at Sotheby's Hong Kong fall auction, which kicks off on Friday night and continues through Tuesday.

Sotheby's is the first of the major fall auctions in Hong Kong, and dealers and collectors will be watching for signs of a healthy market.

Yun Gee's "Wheels: Industrial New York," which Sotheby's describes as the artist's most important work, has a price estimate of $10 million to $15 million.

Gee, who was born in Guangdong Province in 1906 and emigrated to the U.S. as a teenager in 1921, died in New York in 1963. Saturday night's auction will be the first time the painting has been up for sale, having been in his family's possession for 85 years.

Gee is not as well known as Zao Wou-ki, the prominent Chinese-French artist who died in 2013, nor was he as prolific. "But his importance is second to no other, especially in the history of Chinese-American art," Felix Kwok, Asia deputy director and senior specialist of modern Asian art, told the Nikkei Asian Review.

Gee painted "Wheels" at the age of 26 in 1932, when he was one of 65 artists invited by the Museum of Modern Art in New York to submit new works for a special exhibition, making him the first Chinese artist to be represented at the gallery.

"Wheels," which stands more than two meters high, depicts the New York skyline and Brooklyn Bridge towering above a circular group of 12 horse-riding polo players, portrayed as warriors from the Crusades.

"It's an American story told by a Chinese painter," Kwok said, adding that Gee's work details the emergence of America as a superpower in the years after World War I. Gee employed an Asian perspective to illustrate the importance of the period, Kwok said. The 12 figures represent entrepreneurs -- "a new profession or maybe a new identity," he said. "They form a team, a wheel -- it's like a machine."

Nicolas Chow, Sotheby’s Asia deputy chairman and international head of Chinese works of art, holds a Northern Song Dynasty ceramic at a preview of Sotheby's Hong Kong auction on Sept. 28. (Photo by Shinya Sawai)

The artist fused both the traditional and the modern in his work, Kwok said. "From a Chinese point of view, we can easily find that it's under the composition of traditional Chinese ink paintings, landscape paintings -- but all the mountains, trees, Chinese pavilions are replaced by modern skyscrapers, bridges and polo players."

Also of high interest at the Sotheby's auction is a Chinese ceramic brush washer that is expected to fetch more than $13 million. The piece was made at the Ru, or official, kilns during the Northern Song dynasty (960-1127). "It was the first time that ceramics were made exclusively for the [imperial] court," said Nicolas Chow, Sotheby's Asia deputy chairman and international head of Chinese works of art.

The kilns were active for a short period -- roughly 20 years -- and of all the pieces created during that time, only 87 have survived. Most are in museums in Beijing, Taipei, London and elsewhere, but four are in private hands. "Of those four, this is by far the finest in terms of its condition," Chow told the Nikkei Asian Review.

The piece, a mere 13cm in diameter, is a monochromatic blue-green glaze with a network of thin crackle lines. "It embodies Confucius' ideals that were popular at the court since the 11th century," Chow said, with an emphasis on the concepts of humility and which followed the excesses of the Tang dynasty.

"This is really the most faked ware in the history of Chinese ceramics, because the mythology around Ru ware is greater than that around any other object in the history of Chinese art," he said. "I think we will see a big fight for this piece."