fake has research value, wrong!
The major crisis facing Chinese cultural relics today is not the so-called outflow of cultural relics, but the fraud and sale of cultural relics.
From the golden jade clothes, the jade stools of the Han Dynasty, and many other examples, we have seen that the authority of cultural relic identification was cheated and knocked down one by one by fakes. These authorities and their disciples are the cadres of the major museums. If even they are deceived by fakes, there may be disputes over the authenticity of the collections in the museum in the future. Since the authenticity of
is uncertain, some people will boldly pirate the authentic items in the museum and replace them with fake ones, which will cause the pollution and sinking of cultural relics.
Forbidden City Ge Kiln Exhibition site
The most famous case of self-robbing in recent years occurred at the Eight Temples Management Office outside the Chengde City Cultural Relics Bureau of the Palace Museum. From May to November 2001, the director of the management office, Li Haitao, stolen 86 cultural relics in the warehouse for resale, and then replaced the genuine ones with fake ones. These stolen goods appeared at Christie’s Hong Kong auction company in October 2002, and they were all accompanied by the original label of the Palace Museum Cultural Relics Management Office. Because some people recognize the origin of these tags, the whole case was solved.
If this pirate group is not so careless, but destroys the Forbidden City label first, this case may still be unknown and unknowingly; the result is that some counterfeit products have been passed down as genuine products for generations. The
Li Haitao incident is certainly not an isolated and accidental case. According to reports, there were 36 cases of self-robbing of cultural relics guards across China in 2004, and the number has increased year by year.
The Puning Temple
cultural relics of the Eight Outer Temples in Chengde were stolen and sold. As long as they are not destroyed, the matter is still small; but it is an extremely serious matter if it is false. Because if the authenticity of cultural relics is doubted, their value will fall sharply. With a sharp drop in value, cultural relics will not be protected by the public, and even become dirty and deceptive things in the eyes of the public.
We often hear a theory that the fun of research is only if there are fakes. If all the cultural relics are genuine, then the knowledge of identification is useless and the possibility of finding out is lost.
According to this statement, it seems that the more fakes, the more fun it is to collect. In fact, it is quite wrong.
Forbidden City Ceramics Hall
If we are going to a restaurant to taste the food today, but we are worried about the uncleanness of the food; so every dish comes up, everyone desperately checks whether it is clean, and we use chopsticks to stir it in the soup continuously to see if there are any flies in it. . I would like to ask, is this to enjoy or suffer?
Seeing ancient cultural relics, I can’t enjoy it at ease, but always worry about the authenticity, which is very unpleasant.
Everyone knows that to appreciate ancient cultural relics, one is the archaeological value, that is, to understand the past through the cultural relics; the second is to appreciate their artistic achievements; the third is to satisfy the mystery of crossing time and space and being able to contact ancient people.
The crime of fake cultural relics is one of falsifying history, another is to distort the lively and natural traditional art with the slightest difference in courage, and the third is to deceive collectors' nostalgia.
Zhao Mengfu's Grand Exhibition at the Wuying Hall of the Forbidden City
I have some friends who originally liked Chinese cultural relics, but later discovered that they were actually worthless fakes. Since then, their love for Chinese cultural relics has turned into extreme disgust. There is a popular saying in
collection circles that buying antiques must go through a trilogy: start to be deceived, deceive yourself in the middle, and finally deceive.
lie to oneself means self-brainwashing, thinking the fakes you bought into reality. The deception is to dump the fakes bought to others and reduce their own losses. Therefore, the proliferation of fakes not only hurts people's money, but also hurts people's minds, and finally makes people degenerate into liars.
Now let us compare a Shang Fangzhao and its imitations to see how fakes pollute traditional Chinese aesthetics.
The Fang Zhu on the right of Figure 1 is in my possession and purchased from the internationally renowned antique dealer Giuseppe Eskenazi in New York. The one on the left is a fake, which is said to have been exhibited in Paris and sold at a high price.
square comparison
square comparison-partial
comparison of these two pictures, you can see the difference in casting methods. The authentic product on the right of
is cast with block method, and the soil contained on the leg can also be seen. The fake one is cast with a modern silicon mold and lost-wax method, so it doesn’t show up. In the shape of
, the genuine product is stable and powerful, while the fake one is thinner and taller and looks frivolous. The main difference is shown in Figure 2. The above is the genuine productThe phoenix bird is chic and calm, while the fake one looks like a frightened bird.
The aesthetics of the two are only a tiny difference at first glance, but they are quite ridiculous at first glance; China's great Shang and Zhou bronze aesthetics have been distorted and contaminated here.
National Museum Zhaozhou Bridge Stone Bar (Sui) was exhibited at the scene of
fakes from manufacture to sale, after a series of people. If these people are benefited, they will combine to prevent fraud from being dismantled, thus forming a black force that suppresses the truth.
The more rampant cheating is, the more this black force expands. In the end, everyone who knows the truth will shut up, while those who cheat will be unscrupulous. For example, some people say that 95% of the products on the market are genuine products, which is in this category.
A friend in the archaeological world said that when they were engaged in archaeological excavations, they were afraid of others stealing cultural relics; now they are afraid that some people will mix in fake cultural relics.
Because the cultural relics unearthed through archaeological excavations are recognized as authentic; if a counterfeit is considered to be an archaeological unearthed, all experts can be deceived; the same kind of imitations can also be ascended to heaven and be recognized as authentic.
The woodcarving Guanyin statue in the National Museum of China Museum (Song)
Because of the great harm of cultural relics fraud, countries that value cultural relics have established penalties to punish those who fraudulently seek improper benefits.
Regarding unearthed cultural relics, the Chinese Cultural Relics Law severely punishes those who buy and sell genuine goods, but does not actively manage the production and sale of fake goods, which is tantamount to encouraging the proliferation of fake goods in disguise.
Judging from the case of the jade stool in the Han Dynasty, many counterfeit products should have broken through the defenses of China's official identification system and become authentic endorsements by scholars.
Exhibition hall of the Capital Museum
In the chaos of overwhelming fakes, there are also some pure land and oasis, which are the Chinese cultural relics collected by famous foreign museums and collectors.
Most of these cultural relics have not been contaminated by fakes, and the proportion of genuine ones is very high. Every time they are put out for auction, they are always sold out.
If the Chinese government figured it out in the future, it is willing to open up the unearthed cultural relics market and put up many of the government’s never-seeing cultural relics for public auction. The Chinese collectors used these "highly clean" cultural relics as templates, and coupled with scientific tests, it should be able to effectively identify the authenticity.
Only in this way can we use genuine products to eliminate counterfeit products and let "good coins" drive out "counterfeit coins", so that Chinese unearthed cultural relics can be protected from further pollution and the value of cultural relics that they deserve can be promoted. The above content of
only represents the author's personal views.
About the author:
Cao Xingcheng, born in February 1947, was born in Jining, Shandong. He used to be the president of the "Qing Ling Ya Collection". He has a wide range of collections, among which bronzes are the most famous, and he owns many porcelains, calligraphy and paintings and gilt Buddha statues. Boutique.
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