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The Art of Fakery

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Re-Made in China
The Art of Deception: Eminent economist tied to fake antiques
Fake Antiques are a tradition in China
Economist tied to fake art faces tax charges
Thesaurus becomes synonym for 'fake'

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Chinese Antique Furniture (AFC) Inc.

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Re-Made in China

Reprinted from :http://www.gluckman.com
By Ron Gluckman /in Beijing, Shanghai, Zongshan, Jingdezhen, Hong Kong and Macau

Those nifty wooden chests and old-style cabinets aren't the only Chinese reproductions pouring forth from the mainland. Imperial pottery factories have been re-fired to churn out copy China that unwitting collectors buy for millions, while paintings and other forgeries flow through the finest museums and auction houses. China has become renowned as the world capital of art forgery, which is only fitting, since fraud is considered a fine art in the Middle Kingdom.

PABLO PICASSO once proclaimed, "We all know that art is not truth." Collectors visiting China quickly become even more cynical. With art here, there is no truth.

Nobody knows that better than Dick Wang, who enjoys a rare perspective on Beijing’s red-hot market in art and antiquities. From the second-floor window of his gallery, Wang looks down on Liulichang, a shopping street popular with tourists and locals alike. Many visit the stylish Wang & Co. and show off treasures they’ve mined from nearby markets. "All of them are fake," he says.

Getting burned is common, and not even Wang, who worked for five years as an expert on Chinese art at auction house Sotheby's in London and New York, is immune. A few years back he bought a Tang dynasty horse for $12,000—a steal, or so he thought. It turned out to be a well made but worthless fake. "I call that my tuition," he says with a smile.

Forgery is hardly new in the art world, but China is considered a leader in the field. Bogus pieces constitute as much as 80 percent of the value of goods for sale in Hong Kong, and are even showing up in museums, auction houses, and high-end galleries. Most of those pieces probably originate in China. ''You find copying everywhere people collect art, but, when it comes to art fraud, China is probably the world capital," says one Beijing art consultant.

"There are so many fakes in the market," adds Alfreda Murck, who was one of the New York Metropolitan Museum's Asian art curators. Now she authors art books in Beijing, where she sees firsthand a market flooded with fakes. "Telling them from the real thing is sometimes impossible."

Liulichang Street, Beijing’s Antique Alley, doesn’t look ominous. A few blocks south of Tiananmen Square, it has scores of charming wooden, tile-roofed shops displaying weathered pottery, furniture, books and bric-a-brac. Tourists have strolled the quaint cobbled lane for ages, even if they aren’t hunting for any particular treasure. Street touts pounce on potential marks, pushing forward photo albums.

"You want Qing?" asks one, pointing to photos of prized porcelain. "Yuan and Song pieces, one thousand years old, very cheap!" Huge vases, meticulously glazed plates, and bronze statues are offered, all at prices that are unbelievable—if the pieces are real. None are, says Wang. "Probably ninety-five percent of the stuff you find on the streets is fake," he declares. And what's true in Beijing is mirrored in antique markets across China.

One need only tour the border areas around Hong Kong and Macau to grasp the size of the problem. Huge antique showrooms, one after another, tempt bargain hunters from the wealthy former British and Portuguese colonies.

At Chinese Antique Market, north of Macau, 100 tin-roofed stalls bulge with dusty tables, baskets, and carved wooden panels. Trucks arrive regularly, piled high with old dressers and cabinets. Most are refinished and sold on the premises, but there is also a huge market for reproductions or modern copies. Many are sold as the real thing, for ridiculously inflated prices.

Some shops tread carefully. Sam at Yong Chang Furniture Plant of Classical Arts avoids using terms like antique. "These pieces are all made in the old style," he says instead.

Sam respects the fine line between fraud - passing off a forgery as genuine - and copying, which is considered a genuine art form in China. "The best artists in China always learned by copying," notes the Beijing art consultant, who often works for the Chinese government and wishes to remain anonymous. "They did so for centuries, and that’s still the case."

Nowhere is that clearer than in Jingdezhen, a grim town in southeastern China. Covered by a gray haze, Jingdezhen might resemble any other ugly industrial city in China, except for the magnificent 12-foot-tall vases lining both sides of the main street, home to the world’s largest porcelain market.

Small alleys branch off in every direction, heaped high with plates, bowls, figurines, and tacky ware such as Mao salt shakers, Mickey Mouse casseroles, Princess Di plates, and Pueblo-style ashtrays. Many shops carry finer pieces that look misplaced amidst all the kitsch: thousand-year-old urns, Qing goblets, and ancient plates with intricately-cracked glaze. They look authentic, but all are copies.

The high-fire process of making porcelain was invented in China around the fourth century. In Jingdezhen, it became a sophisticated art form that reached its zenith in a period spanning the Ming (1368-1644) and Qing (1644-1911) dynasties. All imperial ware - most prized by collectors today - was made here by the country's best craftsmen.

Ironically, these treasured plates and bowls were, centuries ago, copies too. Teams labored for years to meticulously reproduce massive dinner sets for the emperor and his court.

Jingdezhen’s artistry declined over various periods of upheaval and was all but forgotten during the decades of Communist austerity. By 1991, all but two of its 32 state-run porcelain factories were shut down, as cheaper manufacturers across Asia and in Central America dominated a market once so identified with China that this was very name for the ware.

In recent years, investors from Hong Kong and Taiwan have revived many studios in Jingdezhen to reproduce Imperial copies for collectors around the globe. Nowadays, an estimated 150 factories and 100 kilns - some the size of football fields, capable of churning out 10,000 pieces per firing - churn out over a million pieces of porcelain per day. Last year, legal sales topped $100 million. Some of the pieces wind up - intentionally or through a convoluted trail of re-sales - in the world’s finest museums and collections.

Sources at leading auction houses say that good fakes are nearly impossible to spot. "Even dealers are fooled," says Karin Weber, who runs a gallery above Hollywood Road, a fashionable Central Hong Kong street packed with antique shops. Some say as many as 80 percent of the goods offered here are fake.

Stories abound about the tricks used to fool experts. "Everyone knows a dozen ways to cheat you," my guide in Jingdezhen cautions as we move through a dark part of town called Fan Jia Jing. Shops here don’t display antiques - only licensed dealers in China can, officially anyway - but queries invariably elicit the same response: furtive glances up and down the street, then a quick retreat to a closet or cellar, where a carefully wrapped, old-looking piece is produced.

"They're all fakes," my guide advises. "Everyone knows how to do it. You rub the piece in chemicals or animal urine to dull the shine. You use dirt and ash in the cracks to age it."

Huang Yunpeng is one of the remarkable characters rebuilding Jingdezhen’s reputation. After 20 years overseeing repairs at the Jingdezhen Ceramic Museum, he is now the director of the Jia Yang Ceramic Studio—and a master copier. One of his fake Ming jars, for example, goes for $300; the original sold for nearly $6 million at a Sotheby’s auction a couple years ago in Hong Kong, then a record.

"I can copy anything," boasts Huang. His Hong Kong partners provide catalogues from auction houses in New York and London. Museum books abound with other masterful designs.

Huang trains scores of workers to reproduce patterns favored by Chinese newlyweds in New York and housewives in Taipei. These days, talent is supplemented by computers. Customers scan images of priceless designs and send them by e-mail. Technology has also been a boon to cheats. Authenticators place great value on the chop, an elegant, intricate Chinese character used to sign ancient pieces and an easy way to tell fakes from the real thing. But now chops can be copied by laser and e-mailed to ceramic shops.

The most dependable method for testing antiques is thermoluminescence (TL). The process, explains Doreen Stoneham, head of England’s Oxford Authentication, the world’s foremost TL lab, involves drilling a small sample of powder from an object. When heated, the powder emits a faint light signal indicating the amount of time that has passed since the object was fired. "Unfortunately," laments Stoneham, "this is no longer sufficient to detect fakes." She won't detail the reasons, but counterfeiters can predict where the tests are likely to be done and inject radioactive material there, says Wang.

"There’s no scientific test that is entirely accurate," concedes Pola Antebi, director of the Chinese Ceramics & Works of Art Department at Christie’s in Hong Kong. She and her colleagues rely on their senses to sift out fakes. "We look at so many factors: the shape; the color of the glaze and whether it’s consistent with the period in question; the glaze texture; the weight of the piece; and the mark [chop]," she says. "We look at Chinese ceramics all day, every day." That experience, she maintains, gives experts the edge. "Forgers haven’t had the privilege of handling authentic pieces. It takes years to get the sense of it."

Still, the phony goods creep through. "There are fakes in every auction. Fantastic sums are at stake, and it can’t be helped," says Wang. "The experts are human, too." Embarrassing mistakes are commonplace, adds Bruce Doar, editor of China Archaeology and Art Digest. "Even the best museums have fakes."

New York’s Metropolitan Museum of Art, for example, has had its Chinese works challenged often in the past. One ongoing controversy involves the 1997 acquisition of a group of remarkable Chinese paintings, including "Riverbank," which the Met maintains is an exceptionally rare 1,000 year-old silk scroll. Many scholars credit it instead to modern-day Chang Ta-Chien, a colorful character who typifies the blurred vision afflicting western curators who try to categorize Chinese art. Chang is considered both China's Picasso and one of the greatest con artists of the 20^th century.

Chang is believed to be responsible for 30,000 paintings, including countless forgeries. Not that that paints him as a rogue in Chinese art circles. After his death in 1983, several exhibitions of Chang's most famous fakes were held. As to "Riverbank," the question of authenticity has been the topic of numerous seminars and several books, but remains spectacularly unsettled.

In the field of Chinese art, it's an expensive but hardly isolated example. "There are fantastic forgeries out there - that's no secret," says Murck, who spent 12 years at the New York Met. She details the tremendous scrutiny that surrounds every potential purchase. "We could spend months on a single piece," she says. "We'd test it and review its history."

One reason Chinese art is so susceptible to fraud, however, is that few pieces possess the kind of ownership trail common in the West. Sales in China are rarely recorded, and the artist seldom attributed. Pieces are more commonly assigned to periods of craft, such as the various dynasties. Antebi describes extensive vetting procedures, including consultation with investigators who monitor the latest forgery techniques. "We can't talk about the techniques for fear of tipping off forgers," she says. Nevertheless, she allows, "Nothing is foolproof."

Though the risks remain high, collectors and museums remain enthusiastic about Chinese art, which most consider to be undervalued. This helps explain both its current popularity and the record prices recorded at practically every big auction.

Hence, even experts like Murck and Wang admit to spending their weekends at Panjiayuan, dubbed Beijing's Junk Market for obvious reasons. Huge piles of newly-minted Qing dynasty wares sit alongside Mao memorabilia. Yet there is always the hope of finding a precious Ming plate among the junk.

Wang once bought a small snuff bottle here for $6,000. A month later, he sold it for $50,000. Wang says cheerfully, "You lose some, but sometimes you win."

All pictures by Ron Gluckman

The Art of Deception: Eminent economist tied to fake antiques

Reprinted from :http://archives.seattletimes.nwsource.com/cgi-bin/texis.cgi/web/vortex/display?slug=cheung27&date=20030127

By Duff Wilson, Seattle Times staff reporter

Seattle Times
January 23, 2003

HONG KONG — Hollywood Road is one of the world's busiest shopping streets, a stop on the world's longest escalator, perched above the world's busiest harbor.

A bustling half-mile, it is lined with more than 200 stores selling Chinese antiques and curios, or curios purported to be antiques.

This money-driven city of 7.3 million has established itself as the gateway for ancient artifacts from what is now the People's Republic of China. Hong Kong is a duty-free zone through which antiquities that would be illegal to export from China directly can be legally sold and shipped overseas. Hollywood Road is where much of that commerce occurs.

On Hollywood Road, as in much of Hong Kong, Steven Ng Sheong Cheung is well-known. But he is known as an economics professor and a columnist, not as an art dealer.

Cheung is one of the people behind Thesaurus Fine Arts, a Seattle gallery that deals in phony Chinese antiques, passing them off as much older and more valuable than they are. He also is involved in a shop off Hollywood Road, called Dandelion Fine Arts, and in a lab that certifies artifacts.

In his native city, Cheung, 67, is revered as "the Renaissance man of Hong Kong." He has taught finance at Hong Kong University and is a personal friend of American Nobel Prize economist Milton Friedman. He has written 20 books. He writes a column on finance for Apple Daily, Hong Kong's second-largest newspaper, and another for the weekly magazine Next. He is a calligrapher and a published photographer.

Sporting a white, Einsteinlike coiffure, Cheung is a bona fide celebrity.

He was recently chosen the "hottest economist of the year" by a prominent Chinese Web site, and a television host said Cheung is "so hot that he's like an academic star." The People's Daily newspaper in Beijing predicted last year that he will win the Nobel in economics. Cheung himself speaks about "Steven Cheung mania."

He is unabashed about his own brilliance. He says he hasn't read a book in years, insisting there's nothing he can learn from them. He boasts that he's China's most popular lecturer and its best photographer.

"I hate famous," Cheung said in an interview. "I shun publicity. But people wouldn't let me off the hook. You know I'm famous, right?"

A naturalized U.S. citizen, he has a $1.6 million home in Hong Kong, a $1.1 million gated home overlooking Lake Washington north of Seattle, and a third home in Shanghai, China.

At Hong Kong University and at the University of Washington, he has specialized in research, writing and lectures on how free enterprise works. His scholarship includes what he calls a "natural equilibrium theory" of corruption.

Cheung believes government regulation can actually encourage misdeeds, saying controls are created "just to facilitate corruption" by officials looking to make money.

Speaking at a 1996 conference on "The Economics of Corruption," Cheung said, "It is no use to put a beautiful woman in my bedroom, naked, and ask me not to be aroused. The only effective way of getting rid of corruption is to get rid of the controls and regulations that give rise to corruption opportunities."

In an interview last week, Cheung confirmed what The Times had been told by U.S. law-enforcement sources: that he is under investigation for alleged income-tax evasion in the United States. But not even federal investigators knew about Cheung's trade in fake antiques.

The economist and his theories

Cheung Ng Sheong was 5 years old when Japan conquered Hong Kong in 1941, and 13 when Mao's troops seized China. At 21, he immigrated to Canada, then to the United States. Like many Hong Kong Chinese, he took an English first name.

Steven Cheung earned a Ph.D. in economics at the University of California at Los Angeles, then studied at the University of Chicago under Friedman.

He joined the University of Washington Department of Economics in 1969 and was promoted to full professor in 1973. He married, had two children, founded Steven NS Cheung Inc. in 1977 and started buying and developing real estate on both sides of the Pacific.

In 1982, he filed for divorce and returned to Hong Kong. At that time, the Cheungs owned property in Seattle; Wenatchee; Belfair, Mason County; Arlington, Snohomish County; Bellingham; Anacortes; Skykomish; and Hong Kong, according to the divorce file.

Cheung moved back to Hong Kong and founded the School of Economics at Hong Kong University. Increasingly popular, he churned out books and articles. He hosted Friedman on tours of China in 1988, 1993 and 1997. They met with top officials, including future Chinese President Jiang Zemin.

The Hong Kong University Web site lists Cheung among eight "Great Economists." The list starts with Adam Smith. It includes Friedman. It ends with Cheung.

Along the way, Cheung's research in economics expanded to include a keen interest in art.

He started trading jade products — "a rare special market" — in 1975, then antiques in 1982.

Writing in an economics text about variances in the prices paid for art, Cheung wrote that "asymmetric information," when one party knows more than the other, causes deceptive and unfair conduct. Buyers lacking information judge the quality by price, he wrote, and a "phony high price" was "often encountered in the arts market."

For example, Cheung described someone who becomes a famous calligrapher by having friends bid up the price on his work. The higher price itself builds reputation and leads to future sales.

He added: "Do you want to try it out and have fun?"

The professor's Hong Kong shop

Half a block off Hollywood Road is a stretch of lower-rent stores and vending carts packed along Upper Lascar Row, more commonly called "Cat Street." The name comes from days when the area specialized in stolen goods; locals called the thieves rats, and the dealers who purchased goods from the rats, cats.

No. 3, a small store with a dirty yellow awning, is Dandelion Fine Arts.

When the owner of the shop next door was asked about Steven Cheung, he pointed at Dandelion and said with a smile, "The professor."

Dandelion appears to have no corporate papers filed in Hong Kong. But Dandelion Fine Arts was a trade name of Cheung's West Coast Land Investments, a company he started in Washington state in 1981. The Dandelion trade name was canceled one month before Thesaurus Fine Arts incorporated in 1998.

Cheung says the Hong Kong store is owned by other people — he won't say who — and that he is just an adviser. A Dandelion clerk said the store has its headquarters in Seattle, but the manager, Candy Tsang, said that is not the case.

Dandelion features pottery, bronze and jade objects billed as coming from ancient China. Several of Dandelion's items are featured in a catalog published by Thesaurus Fine Arts.

As is the case in Thesaurus Fine Arts' Seattle store, several items in Dandelion Fine Arts come with age-test certificates from the City University of Hong Kong, signed by Dr. Po Lau Leung.

Leung is a Beijing University graduate who worked as an astronomer for 20 years before getting a doctorate in physics from Hong Kong University at age 50. He is a member of the Chinese Academy of Science. He also advises the Shanghai Museum.

He says City University of Hong Kong started doing commercial thermoluminescence, or TL, testing on pottery in about 1997. TL is the only scientific method for measuring the approximate age of pottery.

Leung says one of his first customers was professor Cheung. Leung said Cheung did business first as Dandelion Fine Arts, then as Thesaurus Fine Arts, and the lab's records reflect that. Cheung would bring the items for testing himself or send an assistant, Leung said.

Paging through his notebook, Leung said he tested dozens of items for Cheung from 1997 to 2000. At first, most of them failed: They were modern, or much more modern than the eras Cheung claimed, and Leung marked them as "inconsistent" with the claimed age.

Then Leung started giving Cheung second chances. If an object Cheung claimed was 2,000 years old instead tested at 400 years old, Leung said, he would offer to provide certification for the latter, rather than to record the test as a failure.

"After result, I said this is fail for you, so sometimes he change his mind, yeah," Leung said.

Leung could not explain how his 1999 test of a ceramic vessel bought by The Seattle Times from Thesaurus Fine Arts found it to be 1,200 years old, while the world's leading TL lab, Oxford Authentication, found it to be less than 100 years old. The leading U.S. lab, Daybreak Archaeometric Laboratory, found it to be less than 45 years old.

The last time Leung tested objects for Cheung was early in 2000. Cheung submitted 10 items.

Leung leafed through his reports: "Fail. Fail. Fail. True. True. True. This one maybe they changed to Ming. ... The last time, many fail."

In the end, only four of the 10 pieces passed the City University TL test, including one or two on which Leung permitted Cheung to change the designated dynasty.

About that time, Leung recalled, Cheung told him he planned to set up his own TL testing laboratory.

Initially, Leung said he didn't know whether Cheung actually had set up the lab. "I completely don't know," he said, adding with a laugh, "In Hong Kong, it's very free. If they have money, they can do that."

Later, Leung disclosed he had suggested to Cheung that he buy a particular piece of equipment, and further, that he had personally provided radiation-wipe tests to certify the annual licensing of what he called "professor Cheung's equipment."

A university Web site listing some of Leung's contracts shows he certified Adsigno Thermoluminescence Laboratory in March 2001. Adsigno is the lab that provided the initial certification for a second piece purchased by The Times, a pottery tile purported to be 400-600 years old and from the Ming Dynasty. That certificate is dated March 29, 2001.

The Oxford and Daybreak labs found the piece to be a fake.

The missing laboratory

Adsigno lists its address as a suite on the top floor of the West Coast International Building, in the heart of Hong Kong's most notorious district for counterfeit items, where fake Prada handbags and fake Windows software are as readily available as cabbage and chicken.

But the lab doesn't have offices where it says it does, and doesn't return phone calls.

The room listed for Adsigno is the corporate office for West Coast International. That company and the building were owned by Cheung and his family until they sold it in 1997 to a company called Celinel Ltd., based in the Marshall Islands.

A receptionist said Adsigno was Cheung's business and said it was in Room 508. But the sign on that door said Colour Art Centre, and the office was closed.

In an interview, Cheung insisted he doesn't own Adsigno and that he just helped set it up in order to get TL testing for less money. He would not say who does own the lab.

Lars Bøtter-Jensen of Risø National Laboratory in Denmark, the world's leading supplier of TL-testing equipment, said he sold a $60,000 machine to Cheung for use by Adsigno. Cheung says the money used to purchase the equipment was not his money.

Patrick Wang, who owns a well-regarded Hong Kong antiques shop named Orientique, said Cheung told him about setting up a new lab.

"He pops into the shop. We chat," Wang recalled. "He says, 'Oh, I bought a machine. I can do tests for you.' "

In telephone interviews, Cheung talked at length about his interest in antiques. He said he's studied them since the 1970s, initially from an academic interest in the power of information on pricing in volatile markets.

"When you do research in economics, you try to find extreme cases to go into to learn about it," he said. "So I am talking about the power of information, and it is very difficult to find anything that is more variable than antiques."

As he learned more about prices and authenticity tests, Cheung says, he developed some expertise and met a lot of collectors. When the Asian financial crisis hit, "Asian collectors wanted to sell out, and I'm the one that served as the middleman."

In the antique market, he said, "You are only selling the probability" that an item is real. Cheung says nearly every antique dealer occasionally sells a fake by mistake. "Would they willfully put out something that they know to be fake? No. Absolutely not. That would be suicidal to do that."

Meanwhile, legitimate dealers in Hong Kong say fakes sold by less scrupulous competitors are a growing problem.

Victor Choi, the best-known antiquities dealer on Hollywood Road, says the con men hurt everyone.

"That is no good if some dealer does this to try to cheat tourists," Choi said. "It cheats the whole industry."

Duff Wilson: 206-464-2288 or dwilson@seattletimes.com

Seattle Times art critic Sheila Farr contributed to this article as did free-lance reporters Tim Healy and Connie C. Ling, both in Hong Kong.

Copyright &\; 2003 The Seattle Times Company

Fake antiques are a tradition in China

Reprinted from :http://archives.seattletimes.nwsource.com/cgi-bin/texis.cgi/web/vortex/display?slug=cheung27&date=20030127

Seattle Times
January 27, 2003

By Sheila Farr, Seattle Times art critic

Every year, a flashy array of fake Chinese antiquities enters the global marketplace — from tawdry souvenir-shop reproductions to brilliantly executed masterpieces that curators call "scary."

Most of those fakes come through Hong Kong, China's wildly capitalistic gateway to the world. Trying to quantify the trade in fakes is like trying to get your hands around an octopus. No one keeps records of the illegal trade.

Authorities rarely enforce the laws against fraud. And most people agree corrupt officials look the other way, or even participate in the trade.

The business in fake ceramic, jade and bronze objects is worth untold millions of dollars each year. In Hong Kong itself, the best estimates say that three-fourths of the "antique" ceramics for sale are fake.

The reason is simple: Collectors are eager to buy the real thing.

After a string of stunning archaeological finds in recent decades and the opening of China to private enterprise, museums and collectors in the West, Japan and China are clamoring to buy Chinese art. Auction prices are soaring: Last year, a bronze wine vessel from the Shang Dynasty (1766-1122 B.C.) brought a record $9.2 million at a New York auction.

Officially, the Chinese government prohibits the export of antiquities and takes dramatic steps to keep its cultural treasures from leaving the country. In the past 10 years, China has executed more than 20 people for stealing archaeological relics.

Yet China does little to control fakes.

For art dealers, then, "it requires absolutely constant vigilance," says Julian Thompson, Chinese art expert for Sotheby's.

Forgeries aren't exclusive to the trade of Chinese artifacts. Anyone who collects art knows that fakes abound, even in contemporary art.

But Chinese art comes with particular issues. With a 7,000-year-old culture, the Chinese have a reverence for antiquity and a long tradition of making and selling reproductions.

"The idea of originality is a modern concept," says Cary Liu, associate curator of Asian art at Princeton University Art Museum. "If you are learning from a master, you're copying the master. The idea isn't to produce an exact duplicate. You end up with a product completely different. The hand of the artist is there."

Yet even in ancient times, some Chinese reproductions were meant to deceive. "It's been going on at least 1,000 years," said Michael Knight, curator of Chinese art at San Francisco's Museum of Asian Art and a former Seattle Art Museum curator. "There are notes about it: 'How to make a jade look old — bury it in the belly of a rabbit for umpteen years,' et cetera."

A few rare objects are so amazing they not only baffle the experts but retain their value despite disagreements about their origin.

A recent controversy over a Chinese painting at the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York illustrates the point. The painting, "Riverbank," was attributed to the great 10th century painter, Dong Yuan. It was purchased from renowned collector C.C. Wang by a Met trustee, who donated it to the museum. Some consider the piece one of the great Chinese paintings of all time.

Yet two of the world's top experts — scholar and author James Cahill and Sherman Lee, a former SAM curator — believe it may have been painted by the 20th century artist, collector and known forger Zhang Daqian, who died 20 years ago. In fact, Wang acquired the painting from Zhang.

The controversy is far from solved, but most scholars now agree the painting is neither by Dong or Zhang, but some other artist between the 10th and 13th centuries.

Liu of the Princeton museum believes the whole controversy was overblown. He says the main thing to remember is the amazing quality of the painting.

"Regardless of whether it's Song Dynasty or some other period," says Liu, "you can't escape the fact that it's a great object. That's a level (of artistry) where the scholars may argue, but they still value the piece."

The bargain trade

On the other end of the scale are low-quality reproductions sold as souvenirs or fraudulently marketed as antiques.

Thesaurus Fine Arts in Seattle, like its counterparts in Hong Kong and other cities, caters to an odd niche market of tourists, unsophisticated art buyers and what one dealer calls "bottom feeders" — people looking for bargains that they might be able to quickly resell for a profit.

Its location among established galleries gives Thesaurus an air of legitimacy, an impression the gallery promotes. In a handout on "Ceramics Dating" signed by "advisor" Steven Cheung, it says: "There are no articles at Thesaurus that are knowingly fake; although some of them I am not certain. However, I have given most of the articles only quick examinations. An article TL tested positive typically commands a considerably higher price, because if an auction house takes it, with a little luck it may bring a very high price. Generally, therefore, the better buy is the untested articles."

That kind of sales pitch appeals to the speculative buyer who has replaced a genuine appreciation for fine objects with a gambling mentality.

" 'Antiques Roadshow' misleads people," says Cheney Cowles, owner of the Crane Gallery in Seattle and past president of SAM's Asian Arts Council. "People don't sell things for $5,000 if they're worth $20,000."

William Rathbun, SAM's curator emeritus of Asian art, says he browsed through Thesaurus when it first opened.

"I went in once and even without my questioning, there were these assurances that it was museum-quality stuff," Rathbun said. "I didn't want to argue, so I just left."

One of the first rules for art collectors is to know the reputation of the dealer.

Thesaurus sells a lot through the Internet auction site eBay, a process that's inherently more perilous for the buyer. It's hard to get information on the seller, and photographs of the objects can be deceiving.

"I wouldn't buy anything on the Internet," says Seattle collector Robert Dootson, a SAM trustee. Even after years of collecting, he still gets expert advice on antiquities, usually from a museum curator, before he makes a major purchase.

Most dealers and collectors talk about the money they lost on fakes as "tuition" — an unavoidable price of learning.

"It's one of the most costly doctorates you can ever buy," says Robert Ellsworth, an outspoken New York dealer and collector who has donated major works to the Metropolitan Museum of Art and other institutions.

Yet they all agree that the knowledge gained is worth it and the pleasures of living with extraordinary works of art are ample reward. The trick is to do your homework. Ellsworth says it's buyer beware.

"That's why I have very little patience with these people who are buying things they don't know about," he said. "They deserve what they get. It's like stocks."

Seattle Times reporter Duff Wilson contributed to this report.

Sheila Farr: 206-464-2270 or sfarr@seattletimes.com

Copyright &\; 2003 The Seattle Times Company

EBay - BUYING TIPS

Reprinted from :http://www.allensantiques.com/ebay_buying_tips.htm

By Anthony Allen,

Allens Antiques

Whether buying antique Chinese ceramics or other Asian antiques on eBay or elsewhere on the internet, it pays to follow a few simple rules:

Do not buy antiques from sellers on the Chinese mainland. Antiques are prohibited exports from China, in some cases carrying the death penalty, so all you will get at best is a modern fake, or at worst, nothing at all.

Sellers on the Chinese mainland know of this recommendation, so they sometimes have auctions listed in pounds sterling or Australian dollars. If they show a shared country of domicile on their listing, eg United Kingdom/China, avoid them.

If the seller is Chinese in any country, buyers should be on the alert. This is not a racist statement but an unfortunate fact of life; most Chinese sellers on eBay sell fakes as genuine antiques.

Do not buy from sellers who have secret auctions, with the user I.D. kept private. These sellers have something to hide. Either they do not want others to know who is bidding, perhaps to stop them being warned, or to conceal shill bidding on their own stock.

Do not buy from sellers who have hidden feedback. They do not want to know what other buyers have experienced, or else are concealing buyers' identities to stop them being warned.

If you have any doubts at all about the authenticity of a piece, either get someone experienced to have a look at it, or do not buy it.

Do not bid early. This only alerts other buyers to the fact that something may be worth bidding on. If one is scrolling through hundreds of listings, mainly of fakes, those which have attracted bids do stand out. Unfortunately, some dishonest sellers have realized this, and shill bid under other names, on their own stock.

If you are concerned about missing a bid on an item, use a snipe program. I personally use www.esnipe.com. They charge one percent, but only of successful bids, and lodge the bid just six seconds before the auction closes; too late for another buyer to lodge a further bid.

When searching for genuine Chinese antiques on eBay, use the advanced search feature and search by country; say United Kingdom or Canada or the U.S. This omits most of the mainland Chinese fakes. Hopefully one day eBay will, if not outright prohibit their sale, at least provide a feature that omits antiques from China.

Also try searching for items that have been wrongly listed, by using key words such as famille, or asian vase, or oriental plate, or Chinese vase etc

Get a guarantee from the seller that the piece is genuine.

Do not pay by Western Union money transfer or telegraphic transfer, unless you are absolutely sure of the bona fides of the seller.

I am often asked who the genuine sellers of Chinese or Japanese antiques are on eBay. Here is a preliminary list of sellers who at the time of review appear to be selling antiques which were accurately described. Please note that this is only a preliminary list, and there will be omissions. No slight is intended if your name does not appear. I am also happy to add to the list. By the same token, if you do not wish to have your name listed here, please just let me know and I will remove it.

The brevity of the list is a pretty sorry indictment on eBay's policy of allowing fakes to be listed as antiques, as most sellers of genuine Chinese antiques do not sell on eBay.

EBay's Specialist Sellers of Genuine Chinese Antiques
antik0531, anthonyjallen, artatsunlinkdotnet, a-takeda, bauhinia, bidancient, bidit-1, bidit-2, braiden24, cleij, dreamcker1, eastwestgallery, edo11, eyerare, jimwiegand, johnarts, newdynasty, scarbo3, yakimono.

Disclaimer
Use this list of specialist sellers at your own risk, as no liability will be accepted by Allen's Antiques Ltd for any item sold by these sellers, that may prove to be other than as described by them.

Economist tied to fake art faces tax charges

Reprinted from :http://archives.seattletimes.nwsource.com/cgi-bin/texis.cgi/web/vortex/display?slug=cheung29&date=20030129

Seattle Times
January 27, 2003

By Duff Wilson, Seattle Times staff reporter

A prominent economist whose Seattle art gallery was exposed for selling fake Chinese antiques now faces federal tax-fraud charges and a state investigation of the gallery.

The Justice Department yesterday charged Steven Ng Sheong Cheung and his wife, Linda Su Cheung, with conspiracy to defraud the United States by failing to report millions of dollars in income from Hong Kong parking lots and other businesses.

In a separate action, the state attorney general announced an investigation into Thesaurus Fine Arts, the Pioneer Square gallery the couple owns. That investigation results from a Seattle Times story revealing that Thesaurus was selling fake antiques in the store and on the eBay Internet-auction site.

The federal indictment, issued in U.S. District Court in Seattle, caps a lengthy investigation of the Cheungs' income from Hong Kong parking lots, offshore corporations and secretive money transfers from Hong Kong to the Seattle area.

The Cheungs, who are U.S. citizens, have homes in Hong Kong, Seattle and Shanghai, China. Steven Cheung, 67, is a former economics professor at the University of Washington and at Hong Kong University and is regarded as one of Asia's best economists. He writes a newspaper column and is a celebrity in Hong Kong.

He is charged with six counts of filing false tax returns and six counts of failing to file a report of a foreign bank account. He faces up to 83 years in prison and $4.75 million in fines if convicted.

Linda Cheung, 56, is charged with one count of conspiracy, punishable by up to five years in prison and a $250,000 fine.

Assistant U.S. Attorney Janet Freeman said Cheung hid income since at least 1989 and secretly transferred money since at least 1993. U.S. citizens are required to report income from anywhere in the world.

Cheung used the money, prosecutors say, to invest in companies, including a bank and an airplane-parts firm; to buy real estate, including a $1.1 million home and an apartment building in Seattle; and to buy a $294,000, 44-foot SeaRay yacht called the "Westwind."

The 28-page indictment described Thesaurus Fine Arts as part of the "web of corporations" in the tax conspiracy. The store has been closed since Sunday, when The Times investigation was published, and yesterday a sign said it was closed until the staff returned from vacation.

Cheung insists he is innocent and did not know he was supposed to report the income in question. In an interview with The Times last week, he said, "I was framed" in the tax case.

Cheung, who is now in Hong Kong, has waived extradition and agreed to appear for arraignment in Seattle on Feb. 20, Justice Department spokesman John Hartingh said.

The indictment says Cheung tried to hide his ownership of companies that operated more than 50 public parking lots in Hong Kong with annual receipts in the tens of millions of dollars, among other businesses.

He took cash and other income from the parking lots and sent cash and cash wire transfers to the United States "to attempt to prevent the tracing of funds," the indictment charges.

The IRS said the listed owner of the businesses, Celinal Ltd. of the British Virgin Islands, is actually Cheung. The word "Celinal" is formed from the names of Cheung's wife and children.

IRS Special Agent Steven Pasholk said in a news release, "This is another example of how the IRS is actively pursuing the use of offshore financial arrangements in order to avoid tax."

U.S. Attorney John McKay in Seattle credited Hong Kong authorities with "remarkable assistance" in the investigation.

Prosecutors charged Cheung with laundering millions of dollars from Hong Kong through Washington corporations and investments, including:

• $693,000 in 1993 to invest on his behalf in Asia Europe Americas Bank of Seattle.

• $1.1 million in 1996 to buy part of the University Heights Apartments in Seattle.

• $3.5 million in 1997 to purchase Dow Elco, an airplane-parts manufacturing company in Montebello, Calif.

• $1.7 million in 1997 to buy waterfront property in Anacortes.

• $116,725 in 1997 to buy unspecified fine art from Christie's auction house in New York.

The indictment lists Thesaurus Fine Arts as being among "the web of corporations and other entities" the Cheungs used to hide income.

The Times was unaware of the Justice Department's tax investigation of Cheung until the latter stages of the newspaper's reporting on Thesaurus Fine Arts.

In interviews with The Times, Cheung had adamantly denied he owned the gallery. But this week he told Apple Daily, a Hong Kong newspaper at which he is a columnist, that he and his wife own part of the store.

The Times' investigation revealed that many of the antiques sold by Thesaurus in the store and on eBay are considered obvious fakes by experts in Chinese art. The newspaper purchased two pieces that were sold by Thesaurus as ancient but were shown in tests to be much newer and less valuable.

In response, the Consumer Protection Division of the state attorney general opened its own investigation Monday.

The state investigators are working with eBay, a spokesman for the Internet company confirmed. Thesaurus was still selling items on eBay yesterday, and a note on some items claimed the ones the newspaper proved were fakes were, in fact, authentic antiques that had been tampered with by the newspaper or a mailing service.

"We stand for our honor and our guarantee policy always stands," the company writes on eBay.

Four people who bought objects at eBay contacted the newspaper this week, and at least one of them, who paid more than $30,000, began trying to return his items.

Steve Cheung's criminal defense attorney in Seattle, Rob McCallum, a former tax prosecutor, and Linda Cheung's attorney, Allen Bentley, did not return calls for comment yesterday.

Cheung had an unusual response Monday night to the Times articles questioning his integrity as an antiques dealer.

"Your article was wonderful!" he said. "It helped a lot. ... Thank you! Thank you!"

Cheung added, "The fireworks begin tomorrow," and hung up.

Times reporters Steve Miletich and Mike Carter contributed to this report. Duff Wilson: 206-464-2288 or dwilson@seattletimes.com.

Thesaurus becomes synonym for 'fake': More gallery items checked; none appear legit.

Reprinted from :http://archives.seattletimes.nwsource.com/cgi-bin/texis.cgi/web/vortex/display?slug=fakes09&date=20030209

Seattle Times
Febrearu 09, 2003

By Duff Wilson and Sheila Farr, Seattle Times staff reporters