James Cahill paper for American Academy of Arts and Sciences Western Center program, Asian Art Museum, S.F., March 3, 2001 Chinese Art and Authenticity
(Introductory remarks: thanks to Paul Silverman, Jean Keating)
The problem of authenticity in Chinese art can be considered from two points of view, theirs and ours. How the Chinese thought about the problem, that is, and how we can and should grapple with it. I’ll talk about both tonight, going back and forth between them.
First, Chinese attitudes toward forgery. A belief that is widespread outside China has it that the Chinese don’t really care about authenticity--distinguishing the real thing, that is, from the copy or imitation. A New Yorker article (June 15 1998) , for instance, adduces the Chinese practice of making replicas of archaeological objects and other artifacts so convincing that they can send them abroad in exhibitions, in place of the original objects; and also of rebuilding old buildings instead of preserving or restoring them, duplicating old artifacts with modern materials, using conservation techniques that don’t permit the original parts to be clearly distinguished from the restorations. All these convince the writer that the Chinese have a very different concept of authenticity from ours. And he comes to this conclusion: “Recognizing the importance of the original hand of the artist places a value on individualism that is foreign to Chinese culture.”
But that’s much too broad a statement, true for some of the Chinese arts but quite false for others. To be sure, the identity of “the original hand of the artist” plays no part in evaluations of architecture, sculpture, bronzes, ceramics, and others that correspond, for the Chinese, with what we would call the applied arts. But for those that correspond roughly to our concept of “fine arts,” primarily painting and calligraphy, the hand of the maker, and his or her original style, are absolutely central to appreciating them. And these two categories of art, whatever we call them (Nelson Goodman uses the terms autographic and allographic), can’t be lumped together when we consider problems of authenticity.
I’ll be speaking tonight chiefly about Chinese painting, both because it’s what I know about and because it presents, I think, the most interesting authenticity problems. Since it would be dull to simply sum up accepted views on the matter, I’ll try to offer some less accepted, even controversial ones--trusting (and knowing from previous occasions of this kind) that my colleague Jerome Silbergeld will not let them slip by unchallenged. But before turning to painting I want to note a few implications of the common Chinese practice of replicating or forging (the distinction isn’t always clear) archaeological finds.
S,S. In the 1940s, small grey-pottery figurines with burnished black surfaces and sculpturally interesting shapes, said to date from the late Zhou period (ca. 4th cent. B.C.) and to have come from tombs at a place called Huixian (after which they were named), began to appear on the market in Luoyang and elsewhere. They were bought by collectors and museums all over the world.
S,S. As time went on, examples appeared that were even more excitingly expressionist-looking. (They are supposed to represent mourners wailing at the funeral of the deceased.) But eventually the bubble burst: forgers in Luoyang were making them in quantities to supply the market, and prices dropped dramatically.
S -- So far as I know, the pieces closest to them that have been unearthed in controlled excavations are these relatively inert and unexciting specimens. Some of the Huixian figurines appear to have been genuinely antique, however, and the thermoluminescence technique of dating ceramics can be used to sort them out from the forgeries.
S,S. The forgers’ practice of supplying a demand when archaeology or genuine tomb-looting falls short continues today: the attractively slim figurines of young men and women uncovered in 1992-3 in an early Han imperial tomb near Yangling have appeared on the market since then in greater numbers than clandestine excavation and smuggling can account for. Antique stores in Hong Kong are filled with replicas of tomb objects purportedly smuggled from excavations on the mainland; most of them are in fact made for the trade.
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