"Made in Henan" is a term that causes headaches for both the collection and appraisal circles. Many experts have fallen for "Made in Henan".
In recent years, the boom in private collection has led to a surge in demand for appraisals of cultural relics and artworks, and with this comes an endless stream of appraisal scams and chaos. This article sorted out the major scams in the field of cultural relics and art appraisals in recent years to explore the technical gaps and practical bottlenecks in current cultural relics appraisals. Cultural relics appraisal is on the dual track of commercialization and cultural relics protection. It is not clear whether it can get rid of the chronic disease of division.
In mid-May 2013, two auction companies, Beijing Poly International Auction Company and Beijing Zhongmao Shengjia, successively issued announcements that they would auction the manuscript of Qian Shu’s letters. After being opposed by Qian Shu’s widow Yang Jiang, the two companies successively Announcing the cancellation of filming. Among the three letters that Poly canceled the auction, two were pointed out as forgeries by Wei Tongxian, the correspondent and former president of Shanghai Ancient Books Publishing House. In response, Poly said: "The relevant auction has been withdrawn and there will be no response."
The "International Art Market 2011: Observation on 25 Years of Art Trading" report released on March 16, 2012 revealed that China has surpassed the United States to become the world's largest art and antique market, ending the decades-long decline of the United States. leadership in the field. According to the "2011 China Cultural Relics and Art Auction Market Statistical Annual Report", in 2011, 779 cultural relics and art auctions were held across the country, with a turnover of 55.353 billion yuan.
In addition, the boom in private collections in recent years has led to a surge in demand for appraisals of cultural relics and artworks, and with this comes an endless stream of appraisal scams and chaos. On the east and west streets of Liulichang, Beijing, there are many shops with the words "Cultural Relics Appraisal" on them. "As long as you are willing to pay, even if the thing you get is new, someone can package it with a historical background. It's just a stone, and some people can "call a deer a horse." In fact, this kind of art appraisal certificate with a clearly marked price has no legal effect in any situation, but for various purposes, there are still people who are willing to pay for appraisal. This market is very hot and the water is too deep.”
On September 25, 2004, Ma Chengyuan, “the first person to appraise Chinese bronzes” and former director of the Shanghai Museum, passed away. His death was described by close friends as "the loss of a genius, a master who loved cultural relics so much."
In his early years, Ma Chengyuan appraised cultural relics for collectors at home and abroad for free. Ma Chengyuan wrote prolifically throughout his life and published more than 80 bronze monographs and papers. Li Xueqin, a colleague and famous historian, commented: "His 16-volume "Complete Collection of Chinese Bronze Wares" is currently the best bronze book in China." Regarding Ma Chengyuan's death, the official report said that he died of illness, but Taiwan's "China Times" He once published an article "The Mystery of Shanghai Museum Director Ma Chengyuan's Suicide in 2004", revealing that Ma Chengyuan may have been stimulated by rumors of forged bamboo slips and committed suicide by jumping off a building.
The article mentioned that Ma Chengyuan talked about these bamboo slips in an exclusive interview with "China Times" in 2002, saying that in the spring of 1994, some Chu slips appeared in the Hong Kong antique market, some of which were genuine, but there were also many fake ones. , they are almost real, and most of them are forged by experts in illegal cultural relics from mainland China. In those years, counterfeit bamboo slips were bought in Hong Kong and Taiwan, and also by Japanese calligraphers. At that time, Jao Tsung-i, a sinologist at the Chinese University of Hong Kong, obtained a batch of bamboo slips. After identification, fake ones were eliminated, and ten of them were authentic Chu bamboo slips of the Warring States Period. Professor Zhang Guangyu, who was very concerned about the compilation of bamboo slips during the Warring States Period in Hong Kong, quickly informed SIB of the antique market news and telexed a batch of copies. After research by Ma Chengyuan and experts, they found that the writing style and ink color on the bamboo slips were consistent with the characters on the unearthed Chu slips from the Warring States Period, proving that these Chu bamboo slips were indeed genuine, and they decided to rescue these bamboo slips immediately.
After acquiring the bamboo slips, the Shanghai Museum invested a huge amount of manpower and money in organizing the bamboo slips. However, when a special book on ancient bamboo slips was published in 2002, it became clear that "the Chu bamboo slips bought with state funds are fake." News is coming out one after another. The difficulty and confusion of cultural relic identification can be seen from the above-mentioned incidents where top experts gathered but the truth is elusive. In addition, the cultural relic identification scams exposed in recent years have repeatedly penetrated the bottom line of public opinion.
In the 1990s, handicrafts imitating the Northern Wei Dynasty pottery figurines fired by Gao Shuiwang in Mengjinnan Shishan Village, Luoyang, Henan, were listed as "rescue acquisitions" by national agencies in the Beijing antique market in the summer of 1994. Precious cultural relics of the Northern Wei Dynasty".
On September 5, 2011, Xie Genrong, the former chairman and president of Walson Group, accepted the second trial after being sentenced to life imprisonment in the first trial. Since then, the shocking secret of the "Golden Jade Clothes" has been known to the public.
The gold-lined jade garment was originally the highest-standard funeral and burial garment in the Han Dynasty, and appeared roughly in the Wenjing period of the Western Han Dynasty. Businessman Xie Genrong's "Jade Clothes with Golden Threads" was made by him after he found a pile of jade pieces and asked Niu Fuzhong, director of the Appraisal Committee of Beijing Zhongboya Cultural Relics Appraisal Center, to string them together. Niu Fuzhong also invited Wang Wenxiang, former secretary-general of the China Collectors Association, Yang Boda, former deputy director of the Palace Museum, Yang Fuxu, former director of the Gemstone Appraisal Center of Peking University, and Shi Shuqing, former deputy director of the National Cultural Relics Appraisal Committee. Five experts were dressing up the "golden jade clothes". "I took a trip to look outside the glass cabinet" and valued this "cultural relic" at 2.4 billion yuan.
Xie Genrong used this valuation paper to trick the bank into granting a loan of 700 million yuan.
Another farce came to light in early 2012. A jade stool from the Han Dynasty was auctioned by Beijing Zhongjia International Auction Co., Ltd. in early 2011 for a sky-high price of 220 million yuan, becoming the "most expensive jade" in the auction market that year. The Han Dynasty Jade Stool is a component of the Han Dynasty green yellow jade dressing table with dragon and phoenix patterns. It was once described by an auction company as a set of cultural relics that "can amaze people today and have extremely high collection and historical value."
But a year later, a debate suddenly broke out about whether this jade set was a national treasure or a fake. On February 23, 2012, Wang Rumian, president of the Pizhou Gemstone and Jade Industry Association, publicly stated that this so-called "Han Dynasty Jade Stool" was produced in Pizhou City in 2010 and was originally sold as a high-imitation handicraft by a few young men from Xiangyang Village. After working on it for more than a year, they also asked themselves to provide guidance several times and put forward design suggestions on shape, decoration and pattern. They initially sold it to an outsider for 2.3 million yuan. Wang Rumian said, "I don't know what happened, but today it has become a priceless cultural relic and is being auctioned."
In 2012, ten students from the first training class of the Oil Painting Department of the Central Academy of Fine Arts jointly published an open letter on "Xu Beihong's oil painting fraud", in response to the spring auction of Beijing Jiuge International Auction Co., Ltd. in June 2010. The "Xu Beihong oil painting" titled "Ms. Jiang Biwei's Human Body" was sold for NT$72.8 million. The letter stated that this painting was just an exercise for their training class that year. Incidents such as Song Huizong's "Thousand Character Essay" being suspected of being fake, and Tang Daxi's auctioned paintings being forgeries, have repeatedly turned those record-breaking auctions into fake farces.
Along with the endless appraisal scandals, the inside story of the fraud of cultural relics in various places has also surfaced. The industrial chain from counterfeit production to counterfeit sales has matured in China, and there are various methods of counterfeiting.
In March 2012, a "Survey on the Underground Antiquing Industry" involving Chinese cultural relics was released. The survey analyzed China's huge cultural relics counterfeiting system industry chain and divided cultural relics counterfeiting according to types.
The hardest hit areas for ceramic counterfeiting are Jingdezhen in Jiangxi, Henan (Shishan Village in Mengjinnan, Luoyang, Shenzhen in Yuxian County, Baofeng County), Longquan area in Zhejiang, Chaozhou in Guangdong and other places;
The areas hardest hit by bronze counterfeiting are counterfeiting villages represented by Yanjian Village in Yichuan County, Luoyang, Henan;
The hardest hit areas by jade counterfeiting: Henan (Shifosi Town, Ping County, Nanyang Town), Anhui (Bengbu), these areas Mainly the place where jade wares of the Han Dynasty are counterfeited, Liaoning is the gathering place for 90% of the imitation Hongshan jade in the country;
The areas hardest hit by counterfeiting of calligraphy and paintings: Tianjin’s Drum Tower area is the most common, and fakes in Panjiayuan, Liulichang and other places in Beijing are the most common. Most of the calligraphy and painting comes from local places. In Nanjing Confucius Temple and Qingliangshan Antique Market, most of them are local calligraphers and painters, and their works have been seriously forged.
Among the many counterfeiting areas, "Made in Henan" is a term that causes headaches for both the collection and appraisal circles. Many experts have fallen victim to "Made in Henan".
Walking into the large and small antique markets in Beijing, every bronze sales point has bronzes produced in Henan. History has left the people here with the craft of casting bronzes. In this land, in the Bronze Age, the "Jiuding Emperors" of Xia, Shang and Zhou were cast. At the end of the 20th century, with the tide of collecting craze, one after another counterfeit villages in Henan came into being. born.
Yanjian Village in Yichuan County, Henan Province is China's famous "Bronze Village" and is famous in China and even the world for its production of high-imitation bronzes. Data show that there are more than 300 professional processing households in this village, with more than 1,880 employees, and an annual output value of more than 90 million yuan. The main products include the Eastern Han Dynasty Ma Ta Fei Yan, the Eastern Zhou Dynasty Emperor Jia Liu, the Warring States Fang Ding, the Spring and Autumn Lotus Crane Square Pot and various other products. There are more than 1,000 kinds of wall hangings, antique table lamps, etc.
In addition, there are also a large number of "bronze villages" and "counterfeit-making villages" in the Heluo area centered on Luoyang. In the villages, both men, women and children can make bronze wares. Thousands of antique bronzes flow from here to the country and the world every day.
Currently, many villages and towns in Henan rely on the production of counterfeit goods as their local pillar industry. Ma Jukui, director of the Ruci Research Institute in Baofeng County, Henan Province, said in an interview with a reporter from Beijing Science and Technology News in 2009 that in a village with only more than 300 households, there are more than 20 large-scale cultural relic imitation factories, and there are even more small workshops. numerous. In addition to imitating and replicating tricolor and pottery and selling them as handicrafts, they also imitate and make old "cultural relics" and sell them as another kind of "handicrafts" with a slightly higher price, and the sales are very good.
Ma Jukui introduced the process of local farmers making old utensils. For porcelain, they will bury the newly fired utensils in the soil for as long as two or three years; then apply hydrochloric acid and absolute ethanol to the utensils to make the porcelain and soil more closely combined, giving people a A sense of vicissitudes of life that has been buried underground for many years. For copperware, craftsmen will wear thick gloves, rub the edges of the copperware vigorously, and use iron rods to polish the edges of the copperware in order to leave traces of use on the copperware. Finally, they will apply chemical reagents to make them Form a layer of corruption.
In addition, as the largest antique market in the country, the counterfeiting of calligraphy and paintings in Panjiayuan, Beijing, has already formed a systematic industry chain, which began to flourish after 2000. At that time, a large number of counterfeiters and fake calligraphy and paintings emerged, including shrimps by Qi Baishi, bamboos by Zheng Banqiao, "Guan Gong" by Fan Zeng, calligraphy by Qi Gong, Ouyang Zhongshi and Liu Bingsen, oil paintings by Wang Yidong and Zhang Xiaogang, as well as Lang Shining and Zuo Zongtang. , Lu Xun's works, in the words of many sellers in Panjiayuan: "Every famous artist has them. If you can't find them, they must have just been sold out."
Li Yanjun, Dean of the School of Cultural Relics at Peking University, once provided A set of data: In 2007, art auction houses across the country sold 20,000 pieces of official kiln porcelain. From 2006 to 2009, more than 100 pieces of the Qianlong Jade Seal were sold at auction, but in fact, only three authentic Qianlong Jade Seals were leaked. Li Yanjun explained that the reason why no one pursued the case was because of the dominance clause in the Chinese art market. This clause is set by the auction industry: the auction house is not responsible for the authenticity or defects of the lot.
In addition to the identification difficulties caused by the explosion of counterfeiting, the "upgrading" of counterfeiting technology has also made it urgent to find new methods for the identification of cultural relics.
Taking the advancement of calligraphy and painting reproduction technology as an example, "There are now a lot of things copied and printed by computers in Beijing, and many old experts in museums have never been exposed to them before. If you follow the traditional identification method, stamps, breath, Shen Yun, search records, etc., have all expired. Li Zhiyong, an expert in cultural relic appraisal in Hunan Province, said that Wu Guanzhong’s oil paintings or gouache can now be printed out and have a three-dimensional effect. Modern technology has reached the point where they cannot be identified by the naked eye. In the past, you could tell with your eyes and touch with your hands, but now you can smell it with your nose and listen with your ears.”
In addition, the difficulty of identifying different cultural relics is also different. "The market for calligraphy and painting is the largest in China, with abundant counterfeiting methods and complicated identification. There are so many famous painters, and each painter creates so many things. They are all different and cannot be classified or standardized. You cannot even use one standard to look at the same thing. Painter's stuff.
"Gan Xuejun told our reporter that the identification of porcelain is slightly simpler than that of calligraphy and painting. "Jade has high and low indicators of material and craftsmanship, which is relatively convenient in identification, but calligraphy and painting are more troublesome. ”
In reality, it is difficult to balance the commercialization and protection of cultural relics in the identification of cultural relics. Under the huge entanglement of interests, absurd examples of fake cultural relics being identified as genuine and genuine cultural relics being identified as fake frequently occur. , and there are endless interests.
In 2003, the Palace Museum reached an agreement with Guardian Auction House to purchase a controversial calligraphy work "Ode to the Master" since the Tang Dynasty. , has been circulated in an orderly manner, and disappeared from the public after 1945. In July 2003, it suddenly appeared at China Guardian's 2003 spring auction, causing an uproar in the industry. On August 21, Xiao Yanyi, the then deputy director of the Palace Museum, publicly admitted that he and Xiao Yang, who heads the weekend auction department of Guardian Auction House, has a father-son relationship, and public opinion temporarily questioned the existence of a secret operation in the acquisition of the Forbidden City.
On August 22, 2003, the Palace Museum held an academic seminar on "Ode to the Master". Wang Jiaxin, then director of the Culture Department of the Department of Education, Science and Culture of the Ministry of Finance, gave a detailed explanation of the acquisition price, reasons for the acquisition and acquisition procedures. Regarding the acquisition procedures, Wang Jiaxin introduced that the Forbidden City first reported to the Ministry of Culture, the Ministry of Finance and the Beijing Cultural Relics Bureau. , and then experts appraised the original, judged and evaluated its price, and later used the state’s right of first refusal to purchase it from Guardian Auction Company.
Although there was a clarification, the acquisition controversy of "Ode to the Master" has already caused the outside world to have doubts about it. The authority of cultural relic identification has been questioned. The emergence of a large number of treasure appraisal TV programs has brought cultural relic identification to the forefront.
In May 2012, the program team of "Collection of the World" promoted Wang Gang 6. The 315 "treasure" fragments brought by private treasure holders that were smashed during the year and identified as fakes by the program team's expert team will be displayed in comparison with the authentic jade items in the Capital Museum's collection until August. Yao Zheng, director of the committee, took 30 experts and collectors to see the exhibition five times and concluded that 90% of the items Wang Gang smashed were genuine, of which 30% were treasures.
For "wrong". "Smash it," said Han Yong, the producer of "World Collection". The program experts are composed of three departments: experts from professional institutions, senior practitioners from auction companies, and brokers in the high-end art industry. "It's nothing for us to use these things." For difficult artifacts, we are completely responsible for the identification results. ”
Although there is an explanation, due to the rapid development of the auction market and the onset of national collection craze, cultural relic appraisal has been constantly impacted by commercial interests, and it is suspected that it has already gone astray in favor of commercial endorsement. < /p>
On March 15, 2011, the CCTV March 15 Party exposed a shady story about cultural relic identification. A CCTV reporter took a Qi Baishi painting that he bought from the antique market for 300 yuan and went to Beijing Jinkun International Auction. Co., Ltd. Appraiser Yan Zhongsheng concluded that the painting was a fake, but after accepting the appraisal fee of 1,000 yuan, he still issued a certificate saying "Painted by Qi Baishi". Later, the reporter bought the vial for 200 yuan. After Liu Yuxin, an appraiser from Beijing Jubaozhai Cultural Relics Appraisal Center, looked at it, it turned into a Guangxu imitation worth more than 200,000 yuan.