| Original Message: More jade - fakes, reproductions, imitations 1 |
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Hi Jamey, Yes, it's a fascinating topic. There ought to be a good book about the history of copying in China, but unfortunately, to the best of my knowledge, there isn't. Historically, it's tied into the deep Chinese appreciation and respect for the past - a desire to do something as well as one's forefathers did. But that tips very easily into the capacity to deceive and defraud - at which point the respectful imitation becomes a fake or forgery. Sometimes these different potentials can be present in one and the same person. Zhang Daqian, who's probably the greatest Chinese painter of the twentieth century, set out to learn from the techniques and styles of his ancestors. He painted copies and then new versions of the originals, then realised that he could make a lot of money selling them to the most prestigious museums in the West - places like the British Museum and the Boston Museum of Fine Arts. Later those museums began to panic when technical analyses proved their acquisitions suspect, but now those same fakes are actually worth more as paintings by Zhang Daqian than they would be as Yuan or Ming originals. But most copyists and forgers merely hide in the shadows of the original. That's the case with the Ming period artisans who tried to produce copies of archaic, mainly Han, jade for a new merchant class that wanted status symbols from the past. I'll attach a picture of one of these fakes, a jade sword chape. When I got it a long time ago in Hong Kong, most collectors and quite a few dealers believed these pieces to be genuinely from the Han dynasty. But I was fortunate to have a close friend who was in the process of training himself to become the foremost curator of Chinese art of the last half century, and he pointed out the stylistic differences between the carving of the qilong dragons on my piece and the way they would have flowed slightly more fluidly, even daringly, on the original. Then we met an old dealer who explained some of the techniques, including burning, that had been used to create the so-called "chicken bone" effect of calcification. Nowadays, these things, which were clearly intended to deceive and which still appear occasionally at auction as "Han", are of course worth just as much as any other piece of Ming jade. Probably there are now fakes being made of them! The second image is of another Han-style sword chape, which I guess must have probably been made in the mid-Qing dynasty - 18th century. Some knowledgeable people who've seen it believe it truly is Han. I think the carving is just too loose, too lazy, for that, though it's quite convincing under a high-powered loupe. Perhaps a Han carver on a bad day, says one of my friends, but for the moment I'm sticking with Qing. I can't say if it is a fake, because I'm not sure it was intended to deceive or if, on the contrary, it was a very carefully made imitation. At this distance, perhaps the distinction doesn't matter very much. Cheers, Will All rights reserved by Bead Collector Network and its users |
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