The Construction and Deconstruction of Authenticity in Chinese Art

Chinese art presents especial problems in the determinative logic of western notions of authenticity.  Authenticity in Chinese art per se must be considered in terms of intangible authenticity, material authenticity or historical-aesthetic authenticity, and cannot be discussed under an all-embracing umbrella where the word “authenticity” is used without further elaboration or distinction as it can operate over disparate planes of enquiry. 
The vague conception of what is meant by authentic works in a Chinese context needs a great deal of elaboration in itself in virtue of the range of constructions of instantiation represented by copies, multiples, emulations, forgeries and fakes of works of art. The paper will address some of these concerns by reference to ancient Chinese bronze mirrors and Chinese paintings on silk and paper.  Historical-aesthetic authenticity of Chinese paintings may result in an appreciation of the pictorial resemblance or lineage of a work independent of the material authenticity of substance.  For example bronze mirrors made for scholarly purposes in the Song Dynasty may be direct copies of Warring States examples, sold as originals on the western art market, which are now regarded as forgeries, but the intention of the Song Dynasty artist was to create a copy for reverential study of the Chinese past.  These invoke the aura of past accomplishments, the intangible authenticity of our appreciation of works we value. Copying was so much a part of the Chinese artistic canon, that some later copies will be indicated as such in the calligraphy or stamps applied to the work itself.  During the Southern Song dynasty (1127-79) and Ming dynasty (1368-1644) many attempts were made to emulate the appearance of ancient Chinese bronzes from the Warring States period or earlier Dynastic eras.  Some writers state that forgeries of past Chinese works in bronze had already become prevalent by the Song Dynasty.  Both in Chinese paintings on paper or silk and works of art in bronze, there is a tension between aesthetic appreciation and material authenticity.  The question for many works of Chinese art is: does this matter?  The audience is rarely concerned, for example, with the precise compositional determination of the red vermilion pigment and oils used for Chinese stamps, but such a study would be of assistance in helping to eradicate the many forgeries of Chinese paintings currently held in Museum collections.  
The same kind of material authenticity concerns which are investigated in European panel paintings can be applied to Chinese art, such as isotopic variations, elemental composition, seal impression pigments and binder, infra-red reflectography, laser-ablation inductively coupled plasma mass spectrometry, x-ray fluorescence analysis, and multi-spectral imaging being good examples on the trail of material authenticity.  This paper will not discuss any of these scientific modes of enquiry into structure and composition, but one should be aware that they exist.  
The appetite for authenticity of the material kind in Chinese art is limited by a wide range of factors, including the admiration for copies, whether produced several hundred years after the original work or not; the aesthetic appreciation of a work regardless of its exact date of production; the fact that every collection of Chinese art contains fakes, forgeries or reproductions, and the difficulties in deciding whether the temporal-spatial instant of the work can be subject to a meaningful deconstruction.

Further questions may be directed to: dascott@ucla.edu