MCLC: Librarian proud of forged masters

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MCLC LIST
Librarian proud of forged masters
Source: Sinosphere, NYT (7/22/15)
Out-Faking the Fakers: Chinese Librarian Proud of Forged Masters
By Austin Ramzy
A librarian who admitted to a court this week that he substituted his own paintings for works by Chinese masters, and then sold the originals at auction, insisted he was not the only one to carry out such fraud. He was simply the best at it.
Xiao Yuan, the author of several books on Chinese art and a former librarian at the Guangzhou Academy of Fine Arts, said he came up with the scheme when he began a project to digitize the school’s collection in 2003 and noticed that many originals had been replaced with fakes.
That was what gave him the inspiration to do it himself, he told the court on Tuesday, according to a video of the proceedings. 
“At that time, when I first looked, I realized there were already many fakes that had already been substituted before me, but I didn’t say anything,” he said. “I was very greedy and tempted. How was it that in the past there were so many people who did this? Now I had the keys, and I could do it, too.”
A year later he began visiting the library on weekends, taking home works by famous painters such as Qi Baishi and Zhang Daqian, then copying them himself. He avoided the best-known works, including the more impressionistic paintings of the Lingnan School, which scholars at the institution knew well and were likely to be lent out for exhibitions.
Mr. Xiao purchased centuries-old blank paper and ink to render his forgeries and boasted that no one at the school’s library could tell the difference. “From then up to the present, no one else understood except me,” he said. “They just understood how to keep track of the numbers.”
Prosecutors said that Mr. Xiao sold 125 paintings valued at 34 million renminbi, about $5.5 million, through auction houses. He also still had in his possession 18 works from the library with a total estimated worth of 77 million renminbi. He told the court that auction houses had thought those works were fake and had refused to sell them.
He was discovered after a Guangzhou Academy of Fine Arts graduate noticed a work at auction in Hong Kong had the school’s seal.
Mr. Xiao told the court he stopped swapping his fakes for the school’s real works in 2006, after the collection was moved to the school’s new campus, restricting his access. Upon seeing some of the collection later, he noted that some of his forgeries had been replaced with even cruder fakes.
“I realized that paintings I had substituted 10 years ago had been substituted again,” he said. “I could tell right away they weren’t mine. The quality was too low. I pointed this out to people, but they didn’t pay any attention.”
Follow Austin Ramzy on Twitter at @austinramzy. 
by denton.2 at osu.edu on July 22, 2015
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