Making forgeries, making canons: Chinese art historical writings in the early 20th century

When art historical writings emerged in the late 19th century, the global art market for Chinese artifacts began to flourish. Japanese scholars contributed importantly to the historiography of Chinese art and wrote the first publications in the field. However, many artworks used in the early Japanese publications were forgeries or misattributed. Forgeries were produced and sold to Japanese buyers. This paper discusses how the forgeries impacted the early writings on the history of Chinese art by Japanese scholars. This paper focuses on the forgeries used in Nakamura Fusetsu's History of Chinese Painting (1913), and on the mutual support forgeries and canons provided each other. Fusetsu's book was translated into Chinese in 1926 and adopted at many art schools in China as a textbook. This paper examines how the Song dynasty painting was constructed as an aesthetic paradigm from the 1910s to the 1930s. With few authentic paintings from the Song dynasty available on the market, forgeries were produced, thus participating in the making of canons, stimulating the imagination of a shared cultural past between China and Japan, resisting an Europe-centered narrative.