Andrew Singer Talks About China and America

Vol. 3, Issue 26

“Seeing” Chinese Art - Li Keran and Me (Part II)

March. Mid-Spring. My exploration of a transcultural appreciation of art aesthetics with the Master of the Water, Pine and Stone Retreat continues. Is my Li Keran Chinese landscape painting real (see Part I)? Does it matter? Should it?

Singer “Li Keran” Landscape Painting

Early on in this journey of examining my Li Keran landscape painting and a transcultural vision of art, Hugh Moss, tries to temper my exuberance for purpose of greater knowledge:

“…in fact it doesn't matter whether it is right or wrong, indeed, if [your painting] turns out to be a fake or even suspicious, and we are able to freely discuss that, it would be just as useful as a genuine one [in exploring] such ideas as authenticity in art and the differences between such an idea between object and process based approaches.”

“Magnificent Mountains with Gushy Cascades,” Li Keran, 1978

My painting spurs Hugh to write more about transculturalism (Moss Part 1 and Moss Part II). In doing so, he quickly bursts my bubble.

My Li Keran is

A fake.

But I am ok with that.

Copying is a time-honored tradition in Chinese art, and landscape paintings are one of its hallmarks. Qing, Ming, and earlier Dynasty painters were/are esteemed by contemporaries and posterity for their talents and abilities to make exquisite paintings “after so and so (an earlier famed Chinese artist).”

These “paintings-in-the-style-of” were lessons, extrapolations, homages, expressions of respect for the Chinese lineage. In fact, it is these later copied paintings that have more often survived the long and turbulent Chinese history.

“Village by the Mountains,” Li Keran, 1985

In the West, copies are fakes, forgeries, and knockoffs--all bad words, that the art world holds in contempt. Though they may be beautiful in their own right and appeal to a mass market, they are not the original and therefore are discredited and considered lesser.

The question is why copies are viewed so negatively. If one regards a painting as object and the sum of its parts, then there can only be one, discreet original that is valid and valued. But it is also more than this.

We need to look at intent. When a painting is not labeled “after so and so” but rather passed off as the real thing, it is intended to deceive. The deception is driven by the desire for personal or financial profit — see any number of movies that revolve around the attempt to substitute a copy for an original to hide a brazen theft. The lengths people will go to in the endeavor are great.

Moss “Li Keran” Landscape Painting

To be fair, there are plenty of examples old and new of artists intending to deceive in China too. My Li Keran is one of them. The painting was marketed as original. Whether it was painted by a student of Li’s as part of respected Chinese heritage or by another anonymous artist hoping to earn a few bucks from an unsuspecting buyer, it is thus a fake.

And it turns out I am not the only person I know with a fake Li Keran in his collection. Hugh himself was taken in early on in purchasing this purported Li Keran landscape that was not originally touched by Li himself.

Once Hugh discovered his error, however, he took an adventurous step, one which not only turned a lemon into lemonade, but was also a practical example of him living his thesis that “art is process” and “art is any creative response to experience.”

Moss “Li Keran” Landscape Painting with Colophon

As he wrote me,

“A while later, another artist friend, Liu Kuo-sung was going to Beijing for an exhibition, so asked if he would take it and show it to Li Keran, with the request that if, as all agreed, it was fake, he would be kind to write on the painting that it was, so no-one else could be fooled. When I got it back, I owned a more intriguing work of art: a fake Li Keran with a genuine signature added to it.

“Amused by the implications of relative authenticity with which I was toying at the time, I decided to mount it as a hanging scroll, and then inscribe the mount with the whole story, which I did in what I call ‘gweilography,’ writing with brush and ink as if it were Chinese calligraphy, but in English.”

Singer “Li Keran” Landscape Painting

Where does this leave me and my fake Li Keran landscape painting? I accept Hugh’s argument for “relative authenticity,” the fact that this “inauthentic object [conveys] an authentic message and meaning.”

If only the real artist had labeled the painting "After Li Keran." It would have added to its authenticity in the classic Chinese tradition. It would not have mattered to me because I did not know who Li Keran was when I bought it. I acquired it because the painting called to me. I felt, and feel, its depth. I step into the scene.

The painting is more than simply an object of art. I have become part of its process and its history, a new audience residing on the other side of the world from where it was created and passed off as an original.

Hugh comes back into my head again:

“The landscape, the perfect vehicle of representation of the fundamental Daoist belief in the transcendence of nature, became a vehicle of self-realization [of ‘inner reflection’]….In the ink-painting tradition, abstraction became a ubiquitous and powerful inner mode, as with inner alchemy, neidan – it shifted from refining substances to refining the self.”

I am not sure I can as yet go that deep; however, my intellectual eyes are now open more, if just a crack.

The new Spring has arrived.

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