U.S. real estate isn’t the only thing Asian investors are unloading these days to cope with the financial crisis at home. Warhols and Lichtensteins are also proving a popular source of liquid cash.

Seven Lichtenstein prints which recently landed in West Hollywood from Japan point up the international drift of economic tides.

“The set ended up coming here because the Japanese dealer couldn’t sell it in Japan,” said wholesale dealer Rick Wolfryd, co-owner of Wolfryd-Selway Fine Art, which specializes in contemporary American art. “It’s what I call the ‘universal reversal.’ At one point the Japanese owned Pebble Beach and the Rockefeller Center. Now they’re selling their assets, and that includes their art collections. The clients we used to sell to in Japan have been offering their material to us at tremendously discounted prices because their economy is so shaky.”

The Japanese were avid buyers of American contemporary art in the late ’80s, helping to drive prices to a peak in 1990. The art market declined sharply starting in the early ’90s; galleries closed and collectors were left holding pieces that were extremely difficult to sell.

Now, with a strong dollar and contemporary American art selling for high prices once again, Japanese owners are beginning to offer pieces for sale in the United States.

“They’re all coming back from Japan,” said Neils Kantor, owner of the Kantor Gallery in West Hollywood. “All the Warhols, Lichtensteins, Rothkos, all the stuff they bought in the late ’80s for all that money.”

In the boom years, Asians bought a lot of art on a speculative basis meaning it was purchased as an investment on the assumption that its value would increase, said Deborah McLeod, specialist in 20th century art for Christie’s Inc.

“Record prices were paid over and over again by Japanese collectors,” she said. “When the market collapsed, they stopped trading. They didn’t want to take your phone calls. Now that the market is stronger, we are now able to tap into those collections. They’re more willing to participate because the loss margin doesn’t look the way it did for a while there. It was looking pretty bad.”

Wolfryd said that as art prices in America rise, and the yen languishes, Japanese owners are starting to bypass dealers and heading straight for auction venues, such as Christie’s. “If prices tend to go up, that may hurt my business,” he said.

In mid-October, Christie’s is holding its first West Coast auction of 20th century art in Los Angeles. McLeod said pieces from Asia will represent about 15 percent of the collection’s aggregate sale value, which is estimated at between $4.2 million and $5.1 million.

The percentage may sound small, but it represents a significant change. “For the last couple of years, things were pretty dead. We had just about zero activity from Asia,” said McLeod. “Now, choice works of art are coming out. The market is strong enough that people feel ready to try out their top properties.”

The strength of the market for contemporary art, she and others said, was demonstrated by the recent sale of Andy Warhol’s “Orange Marilyn” painting, which fetched a record $17 million in New York. That was well above its presale estimates of $4 million to $6 million, and broke the previous Warhol record by a factor of almost four.

Moreover, the local art market has grown dramatically in recent years, with Sotheby’s Inc. and Christie’s both beefing up their presence here, and major New York dealers, such as the Pace Wildenstein Gallery and the Gagosian Gallery, opening satellites in Los Angeles.

August Uribe, senior vice president and director of fine arts for Sotheby’s in Los Angeles, said that in addition to 20th century art, a great deal of Impressionist works found their way to Asia, principally to Japan, and are now beginning to return.

“A perfect example of this is Claude Monet’s ‘Grand Canal in Venice,’ which had been in a Japanese collection since the late ’80s, and was recently sold this spring in New York at auction for $12 million,” he said.

Uribe added that the Japanese are being very careful with regard to how they liquidate their art.

“There’s certainly more from Asia now than there was two or three years ago, absolutely,” he said. “But I don’t think there’s as much art coming out of Asia as was being purchased by the Japanese in the late’ 80s. Not yet.”