Lee Myung-sun

Transcription

FEMALE SPEAKER: Forest is going to talk to us about fakes and forgeries in Southeast Asia. So help me welcome him to Google. FORREST MCGILL: Hi, everybody. Can you still hear all right in the back and everything? Good. Thank you for coming. It's fun for me to be a Google today. I've never been here before and it's wonderful. The problems of fakes in Southeast Asian art are very longstanding and complicated. And one of the points of course that comes up right away is why would anybody be bothering to fake Southeast Asian artwork? And it has to do with the market, of course. Southeast Asian artworks, great ones, can bring hundreds of thousands of dollars or even more. So if you're an artisan in Southeast Asia, if you can produce high-quality fakes and sell them to dealers in Zurich, and London, and New York as the real thing, then you'll make more money in one month than you might make in years otherwise. The problem is very longstanding. I'm just showing you the names of these two articles that were published in 1943, already talking about fakes. So the problem is not a new one. Here in 1943, there's already this recognition of the problem of imitations, fakes essentially. And here's an illustration from one of these articles in 1943 showing a series of heads. And according to the author, this is the genuine one and the other three in each instance are fake. And I think I could probably have figured this out after being in this field for something like going on 50 years now. I think I could have figured it out. But the rest of the time today is talking about how we get at these issues. This is at the Asian Art Museum a few years ago. We had an exhibition on fakes. Museums used to get rid of their fakes or put them in the lowest level of the basement. We get ours out pretty often because we find that the public is interested in them. And we're interested in them too. And as you'll see in the course of the talk today, things that were thought to be fake have sometimes come back from the dead and turned out not to be fake and vice versa. And some things remain for decades as uncertain. We can't decide. No amount of scholarship, no amount of technical analysis has decided the issue in some instances. If you had to vote in this instance, how would you vote? If I said one is for sure almost a thousand years old and the other one is made 30 years ago, how would you vote? Right-hand side is the fake, who votes for the right-hand side? You. Left-hand side is the fake? Well, maybe I won't tell you. Maybe I'll make you come back to the Asian Art Museum and find out one of these days. We have a good online database with pictures and a lot of information about our artworks. And you can access it through our general website. And these things and lots of others are on there. And the fakes are on there too. And they're registered as a forgery usually. Usually, it will say forgery of the head of a Buddha image or something like that. So if you're interested, you can find out. And I think maybe I won't tell you the answer in this instance or at least not right now. Why did the market for these fakes develop? Well, it developed for the same reason that the market for Southeast Asian artworks in general, especially sculpture, developed at all. And that was in part because of the early world's fair. Here's in 1889. The world's fairs in Paris, you know France was the colonial power that ruled Cambodia, and Laos, and Vietnam. Holland ruled Indonesia. Britain ruled Burma. So at the big worlds' fairs and the big colonial exposition, the colonial home countries featured the artworks of their colonies to show their pride and so on, and so on. And in a whole succession of worlds' fairs, there were great Cambodian, ancient Cambodian sculptures and other works of art shown, and ones from Indonesia, and ones from Thailand, and ones from Burma. And there was a lot of interest from 1889 on. There was a lot of interest in Europe and eventually in America too in Southeast Asian art. Well-to-do people wanted for their library or their living room the right kind of ancient head or the right kind of ancient sculpture to decorate their homes with. If you go to Southeast Asia today, and maybe some of you have been to these places, this is Bali. There are stone carving workshops in Bali, in Thailand, in Java, in other parts of Southeast Asia that are producing sculptures like these for restaurants, for gardens, for hotels. And that means that the movement of the stone, the quarrying and the movement of the stone is still very much a going concern. And the skills of carving the stone are very much still alive. These are living traditions. So if you're a stone worker, you can get the stone and make Buddha images or images of Hindu deities or other sculptures to sell to hotels, or restaurants, or gardens, people for their garden. But if you're really good at it and if you're unscrupulous, you use the same skills, the same materials, to make things that eventually enter the market as ancient when they're not. This is in Bangkok. On the right-hand side here is Bangkok. And in Bangkok, if you go to the right parts of town, there are a lot of religious paraphernalia stores, just as-- well, I live in the Inner Sunset in San Francisco. And there's a store that sells Russian Orthodox things, things that are needed for Russian Orthodox Church services, and so on. So you can go in and buy a chalice, or the right kind of crucifix, and so on, and so on. Well, there are religious paraphernalia stores where you can go and buy bronze and stone Buddha images for the temple back in your town. And they're not fake. They're made in the traditional ways and they're often made in the traditional style. But obviously, they're not intended as forgeries. They're just something that you can go buy and take back and donate to your local temple. And the factories for making bronze images are still very much there. So exactly the same kinds of techniques that have been being used for over a thousand years are still being used, the same material. And if you go to Thailand, or Java, or Bali, or Burma for that matter, Cambodia, you can go and visit bronze casting workshops like this and see things being made today in exactly the same techniques and with the same materials that they always have. So I wanted to show you some sculptures that from the museum point of view are clearly not old. When we see these nowadays, we can say this isn't a problem. We don't need to think about it anymore. They're clearly not old. And of course, it begs the question of how do we know? And sometimes it isn't a problem to figure it out. I have 20-something goddaughter who's quite a fashion maven. And she can tell a real designer handbag from a knock-off handbag, a knock-off copy of a designer handbag. She can tell very readily. She's looked at plenty of handbags and she knows a real one from a knock-off. And there's lots in the area of Southeast Asian are where somebody who has been looking at these things for decades and seen lots of real ones and studied lots of real ones, you just get familiar enough. I was thinking at lunch, are there knock-offs of Google Glass yet? Can you buy cheap imitations? Obviously if you can, then you all, who know this stuff very well, can tell the imitations from the real thing easily. So there are a lot of instances where it's not so hard. This one has a lot of stylistic features that aren't right. The color is strange and so on. Then here's one that also you would say, if you've been in the field for a while or looked at a lot of these for a while, you'd say right off it must be fake. And it's partly because we know in this instance exactly what it's copying. The center and right-hand pictures are probably the most famous Buddha image in Thailand. And so this small one in the Asian Art Museum collection, this small forgery, is just a copy of this one, which is very large. And the one that we have in the Asian Art Museum collection may not even have started out life as a forgery. It may have started out life just as a copy, a modern copy that you could go and buy in the way that you might go to a souvenir store and buy a miniature Statue of Liberty something. So it may not have been intended to deceive originally. But then it gets into the market and dealers don't know or collectors don't know. And so something new can turn into "supposedly" something old. Then this is a stone relief from Cambodia in the museum's collection. And it was made 50 years ago, or something like that is my guess. And again, here's what it's clearly basing itself on. This is a thousand year old stone relief that's now in a museum in Paris. But if you look at the features one by one, the hairdo of this figure, the way the club is held, and so on, and so, it becomes clear that this is based on this, or something very close to it. Another thing about this one that clues us in that it's a forgery, again if you know the material a bit, there simply were not temples that had small reliefs like this in such a nice little frame. There aren't any. These would have come out of temples anyway. There aren't any temples that had sculptures of this type in a nice little frame of this size. So it was made for the market. And it was made in this-- well, this one is huge. The one on your left was made in this size and with the nice little frame around it because that's how someone would have wanted it in their living room. So the artisans were responding to what they take to be the wishes of the market. Now, there's two technical tests that we use all the time at the museum-- and other museums use them too-- for helping to determine what's old and what's new. Alloy composition testing, that's straightforward. Bronze is an alloy of copper and tin. And by analyzing it, you can find out what the percentages are and you can check whether it's got the right kind of alloy composition. Thermoluminescence is a technique that's just been developed in the last 40 years or so. And as best I understand it, here's what happens. When there's crystalline minerals-- and clay is one, the clay that we use for ceramics, and bricks, and dishes, and so on. When a crystalline mineral like that is in the atmosphere, it's absorbing radiation from the atmosphere and the surroundings. When it's fired, so you take this clay and make it into something and you put it in the kiln and fire it, all of the energy that has been absorbed, all the radiation that's been absorbed, is obliterated. And so it's set back to 0. And then it starts collecting radiation, collecting energy again from the moment that it's fired. So it's up at this level. It goes down to 0. And then it starts building up again, collecting this radiation. So if you study the radiation and test it against known things, you can make a scale to figure out, or to at least estimate, how old a crystalline material is. And we use it for bronze images like this all the time. So in this instance, the alloy is completely atypical. And I'll show you why in a minute. And the TL test, the thermoluminescence test, gives a date of less than 100 years. So we already thought it was a fake on other grounds. But the tests confirmed it. Now I hope you're thinking to yourself, why does a test that works on crystalline minerals like clay, what good does that do us in looking at something that's bronze? Anybody know actually, what-- yes? AUDIENCE: Well, aren't the bronze castings fired in clay? FORREST MCGILL: Well, yes. Yes. You're on the right track. There fired in clay. And they've got a clay core inside. AUDIENCE: Oh. FORREST MCGILL: So to cast a bronze like this, you make a general model out of clay. And then you put wax over the whole thing. And you model and carve all the details in the wax. Then you put clay over the whole thing again and fire it. And when you fire it, of course the wax melts and runs out. So you're left with the space where the wax used to be. And where the wax used to be, you pour molten bronze in. That means that the core, that original clay model that you started out with, is still inside. And that's why we can use thermoluminescence testing on bronze because most Southeast Asian bronzes still have the original fired clay core inside. So we're not testing the bronze, we're testing the core that's inside it. So for this image, here's its alloy distribution. And you can see it's got a whole bunch of zinc in it, which shouldn't be there. This is a typical element distribution in the alloy. This is a typical one for an ancient bronze. So this big chunk of zinc and the big chunk of lead suggest to us that this is a modern alloy, rather than an ancient alloy. Now, another category of things that seemed suspicious for one reason or another and then get vindicated or further study shows that there wasn't a problem with them. Here's a stone sculpture, fragment of a stone sculpture about this big. Hiram Woodward is the great specialist in Cambodian sculpture in the Western world these days. He's the specialist who knows. And he's studied all the products of the most provincial workshops way out in rural Northwestern Cambodia, and Northeastern Thailand, and so on. So if Woodward studies the piece and says it looks like a fake, but it isn't. It's actually perfectly all right. We can take that, at least tentatively, as the solution to the problem for the time being, pending further study. I should say that for stone the technical dating aspect is much more challenging. There's not tests that will tell you when a piece of stone was carved. You can get the date of the stone, you know 5 million years or whatever. But the date of the stone doesn't tell you anything about the date of when the sculpture was made. There are some analyses that can be done on the surface. Because if a piece of stone has been buried for a thousand years or it's been exposed to the elements for a thousand years, things happen on the surface that you can detect by taking little thin slivers of a sample and looking at it under the microscope. But the fakers have found ways to duplicate those effects. In Southeast Asia, if you're a clever faker, you carve things out of stone and it is said that you bury them under the pig pen. Apparently, this is a good place to bury them. You bury them under the pig pen and leave them for your children or your grandchildren to dig up and sell. After 40 years under the pig pen, they've gotten the kind of surface that they need to fool people in the market. Apparently, you can bake them in various ways and fake changes to the surface by baking them. And one of the things that our conservation scientists at the museum-- and conservation scientists everywhere-- one of the things they worry about is every time they publish a paper, all the fakers read it and figure out a way to get around the new testing methods that they've come up with. So it's very complicated and challenging. This is a little Cambodian bronze. In real life, it's about six inches tall. And it was acquired before I came to the museum. And when I first saw it, I was very skeptical of it. I thought that the style of the female dancer and these little tiny figures below the central female dancer were-- I couldn't account for them. And I'd never seen anything like it. And I searched, and searched, and searched, trying to find a piece of this size and this orientation, with this kind of frame around it, and so on. And I absolutely couldn't find one. And I was very skeptical. And we never put it on view because I thought that it was probably a fake. But then we did an alloy examination and the alloy comes out fine. This is what it should look like. And then eventually I found a picture. In a archaeological book published in Thailand, I found a picture of a quite similar piece that came out of an archaeological context. So finding this picture with a similar frame, a similar dancing figure-- this one is male of course and this one is female. But anyway, it made me feel much more comfortable that something like this could have existed. And we would show it at the museum now. I feel confident enough that it's genuine and old, that we would display So finding the comparable is very important too. For some kinds of things, a standard Buddha image, there may be millions of comparables, so-- millions is too many, but hundreds of comparables. But for an unusual piece like this, just to find one undoubtedly genuine comparable is very helpful. Then there's a whole category of things for us where we've never been able to-- well, where we've gotten the questions involved care of. This head of a Buddha image from central Thailand, when I first came to the museum and saw it, I thought it was almost too good to be true. It's so beautiful. It's in such good condition, that I was very concerned. But we did the tests on it. We got typical alloy. And the thermoluminescence test gave the right kind of dating range. Notice though that the test typically gives a span of 200 or 250 years. If you're trying to figure out whether something was made in 1500 or 1600, the test doesn't do you any good. It's not exact enough for that. But if the question is was it made in 1950 or 1550, then the test is plenty good enough to be helpful. This Buddha image came from the collection of Doris Duke, in her day one of the richest people in the world, in the 1950s. Her family were among the founders of Duke University. Her ancestors had owned the American Tobacco Company, a very, very, very wealthy heiress. And Doris Duke collected Southeast Asian art. And eventually after her death, a large part of her collection was given to the Asian Art Museum. And I had picked out this object from her collection to take for the museum, thinking that there was a pretty good chance that it was genuine. And that even if it wasn't, since it was coming to us as a gift, there was no reason not to take it. If there was any chance that it was genuine, was worth taking. And we did the tests on it and got good results. And also just getting it into the museum, and getting it cleaned up, and getting a chance to look at it carefully, and getting new photography made, it's amazing how much better things look after they've been put at the right height on display, and photographed beautifully, and had good lighting. It makes an enormous difference. Now, this is a glazed clay, low-relief sculpture. In real life, it's about almost two feet tall and very challenging. There are a series of these that are in museums and that have been appearing in the market over the last probably generation and a half. And they're very puzzling. We have three. I'll show you our three in a minute. And all three of ours have had thermoluminescence tests and they've all been inconclusive. And some other museums have done thermoluminescence tests on their ones of these, this exact same type, supposedly from this exact place and this exact period in Central Burma. And the thermoluminescence tests have often been inconclusive. And inconclusive means inconclusive. It doesn't tell you anything. It just means that for one reason or another, the test won't work. And one of the problems-- this doesn't apply to Burma-- but for instance in Indonesia, when you try to do thermoluminescence tests on Indonesian clay objects or bronzes that have clay cores, you often get no result at all because of all the volcanic activity and the volcanic soil. All the volcanic activity has messed up the accumulation and loss and reaccumulation of radiation. So for Indonesian things, often you can't get a good test result. On grounds of style, and on reading the inscription up at the top and so on, this one has always thought probably to be genuine. The temple that it came from, the temple site that it came from is still there in Burma. It's fallen completely into ruins. It was brick and it collapsed 100 years ago. Very little was left, except piles of collapsed bricks and some of these glazed ceramic sculptures. And they were removed by whoever, 100 years ago. And then made it into museums in Burma. Made it into the West for the Western market, made it into museums and so on. Here's another one, supposedly from exactly the same site, also glazed ceramic. And in this instance, we retested. And the second time we did the test, we got a credible result. But we still don't feel too secure about it. If the first test was inconclusive, and a second test got a kind of result that would make us happy, it still leaves us uncertain. Because if you test it the third time, who knows what result you would get yet again. And here's the third one in our collection. All of these are these wonderful sort of whimsical demons getting overcome by the Buddha's power. And this one had an inconclusive TL test. So what do we do? Well, going back to the first one, a scholar who lives in the Bay Area, who's a specialist in ancient Burmese material, has spent a lot of time at the site where these were originally installed, the temple in Central Burma where they were originally installed. And he picked up at the site this fragment. And you can see that this fragment is just like this. It's a skirt, and legs, and a foot. So we brought this into our lab and compared this side by side with this, and this one having come from the site. And our conservation scientist then felt quite confident in saying that the materials of this, the glazing of this, the weathering of this is quite uniform, quite consistent with this piece that came from the site itself. And so we feel vindicated in thinking that this one is genuinely old. Then of course you hit the books again. And one of the things that's very important to archaeologists and art historians is old photographs. So this is a book published in 1892 filled with photographs taken before 1892 obviously. And this is a bunch of these glazed, fired clay panels with demons and other figures in them. Here they are piled up at the site. And our two don't turn up. But this one of ours is clearly in the same ballpark as these. And this one of ours is clearly in the same ballpark as these. So finding this photograph again helped us to feel confident that ours were genuinely old and that they came from this site. Then there's a whole series of problems about things that live somewhere between old and new or genuine and fake. Here's an instance where a perfectly good body has a new head put on it. And this is not uncommon at all. And it's a point of pride for me-- I don't often get these and I'm going to show you a horrible mistake that I made in a few minutes. But it's a point of pride for me that-- when I first saw this, I said to myself, the body's got to be OK. The head's got to be new. And when we did a lot of testing, X-raying, the TL test on both the body and the head, this idea was confirmed, that a new head has been made and put on a body. Because obviously, a body with no head will bring much less money on the market, than a body with a nice head like this. We may pull the head off one of these days and just display the body. But for now, we're keeping it like this because it's an interesting model for people to look at of a part genuine, part new object. Here's another instance where the head and the body don't go together. But they're both old. So a genuine old head was put on a genuine old body that it didn't belong to. Or this one, this is a glazed ceramic elephant. In real life, it's about-- again almost-- between a foot and 2 feet tall. And when you see it like this, it all looks fine. And we very much hoped that it would be fine. I wanted it to be fine because I wanted to use it in an exhibition. But when our conservation scientist gave it a good look, they found that it has lots of repair. So all of the areas on here marked in red are repair. So the figures by the legs, and the figure on the back, and the part of this little stand that has the vase in it on the elephant's back, all made new and added. And you certainly can't tell it when you look at the thing. And this is part of the problem. The ability of the restorer to add missing pieces that looked just right, and to dirty them up, and antique them so that you're not at all immediately aware that there's very substantial areas of repair here. They're very skillful at that. Here's an X-ray of the upper part. And so you can see for instance the join here, where the lower part of this body may be real. The upper part is new. The little vase on the back of the elephant is genuine and old, but it may not go with this elephant. Everything between it and the elephant's back is new. And so we don't know whether that was just lost, but the original little vase still was there and was able to be put back or whether a new little vase-- not a new, an old, different little vase was added to this elephant. Then we work on this stuff all the time. And we've got a number of questions that we've never been able to answer. This metal Buddha image from Burma was acquired by the museum, again years ago, before my time. And if it's genuine and old, it's a very rare and important piece. Here's a Buddha image in Burma of undoubted authenticity, undoubted age, that this one is related to. And it could be related because they were both made in the year 1200. Or they could be related because this one is simply a copy or a forgery of a piece rather like that. One of the challenges with this one is that it's a strange alloy of copper, zinc, and nickel. But this alloy was used in Southern China. It may have been used in Burma in the old days. So even though it's a very strange alloy, we haven't been able to-- well, what we have found is that this strange alloy does occur sometimes in areas not too far away from Burma. So the strange alloy doesn't in itself disprove the authenticity of the piece. Then this one is another one from the Doris Duke collection. And it seemed to me clear that the head and the body don't go together in this instance. We've now tested them both and both the head and the body seem to be new from the thermoluminescence test. But I'm still not convinced. I still have a notion that the body is old and that the head is new. And there's still a possibility of how the test results could be in this instance confusing the issue. Because if the head was essentially welded on to an old body, the heat from the welding may have reset the radiation accumulation in the body. So there are scenarios where a repair to a genuinely old object completely messes up the thermoluminescence reading and so you get a false negative. This one remained unresolved though. This is the back of it. This is what a TL test report looks like. We send them to Oxford in England. That's the big lab. And you get back this thing saying, less than 100 years ago. Not consistent with the supposed date of manufacture. Now, a last example. This painting, which is in real life not much bigger than a regular sheet of paper, it's painted on cloth. And it's really beautifully painted. And I was very excited when it came to the museum as a gift because there are plenty of big paintings on cloth from Thailand, from the 19th century. But we've never found one made before about 1800. And they must have existed. And in the tropical climate of Thailand, things don't survive very well. But it seemed like that since there are plenty from the 19th century, there must be some from earlier. And I got in touch with Henry Ginsberg, who at that time was a curator at the British Library in London. He's a specialist in the painting of Thailand. He died a few years ago. But this was when he was still very active. And he was also extremely excited about this painting. And we thought we had made a real discovery. This is a manuscript from the 18th century. And look at the picture. I'm sorry, it's gotten washed out. Look at the picture in the upper left-hand corner. And you can see that it's very similar to the one we were just looking at. Or this is the one from the manuscript, the one above and the one below. So you can see how this painting combines the figures from the manuscript painting above and the landscape with the prancing deer from the manuscript illustration that's immediately below it. And the inscription also is related. And Henry Ginsberg at that British Library was a specialist in ancient Thai script and ancient Thai language. And he confirmed that the inscriptions on this painting were absolutely authentic for the 18th century or perhaps even a little earlier. So we were very, very excited about this. Because we felt that we had finally found a fragment of the tradition of painting on cloth that existed strongly in the 19th century, that no one had ever found an example earlier. And then to make it even more exciting, we found a exactly parallel painting in another museum collection. This is at LACMA, the Los Angeles County Museum of Art in Los Angeles. And they have this painting, in fact exactly the same size as the one from the Asian Art Museum. I've just blow it up here. But they're exactly the same size. They're both painted on cloth. They both relate back to that manuscript that I was showing you. That manuscript is at Harvard. And both of these relate to it. So we felt that we must have found a painting workshop in the 18th century or perhaps even earlier in Thailand that produced both illustrated manuscripts and big paintings on cloth. And our theory was that the two paintings, the one above my hand here, the one on the right half of the screen and the one from the Asian Art Museum, were two fragments of a much larger painting like this. These are two scenes, the Los Angeles painting and our painting, are two scenes from the previous lives of the Buddha. And in Thailand, there are a number of paintings, like this one in the Asian Art Museum collection, that show the last 10 lives of the Buddha, one episode each, stacked up, two over two, over two, making 10. And so our theory was that the painting in Los Angeles and the painting at the Asian Art Museum were both cut out of a large painting like this. And originally, there would have been 10 scenes put together in a very large cloth painting, that later got cut up. Well, then we had an intern-- I understand that you've got a lot of interns at Google right now. We had an intern-- don't ever get interns. They'll mess up everything. We had an intern who got suspicious of this painting. And she insisted on taking a sample of the paint and sending it off to a conservation center and having it analyzed. And they sent back the results, saying that the paint included a pigment called titanium white, which was invented in 1924. And therefore, the painting could not have been painted before 1924 because titanium white didn't exist before 1924. We eventually sent the painting itself to this lab. And they wrote back and said microscopic examination showed that at some time during its short history, the painting has been pulled over the edge of a board to induce cracking and losses in order to suggest greater age, thus making it a forgery rather than a copy. So it was intended to deceive. Somebody had done that with it, to make it crack and to create some paint losses. And so I wrote this to Henry Ginsberg and said that I didn't believe it. And Henry Ginsberg wrote back. Before he died, he was the greatest specialist in Thai painting in the world. He wrote back and said, if the banner, the painting that we're imagining these two came from or the Harvard manuscript turn out to be forgeries, I think I'll have to consider a new career, possibly in accounting or auto mechanics. I hope it's not too late to retrain. So he was ready to, at least in his joke, to abandon his career for having been mistaken about this. What I didn't mention was the Henry and I had published this painting as the long lost early painting. We'd published it in a very noticeable place. And then it turned out that we were completely wrong, completely wrong. We had been taken in by an out-and-out forgery. And so this is what we eventually found out. Henry Ginsberg tracked this track this down. A very good Thai painter was at Harvard for a period in the 1960s. He saw the genuine manuscript at Harvard and he made forgeries based on the manuscript at Harvard. He needed some extra cash. So he made some forgeries. And we even know his name now. He's dead too, unfortunately. I wish he were still alive so we could get the rest of the story. But it's an example of people who have been immersed in the field for decades, and decades, and decades being completely taken in, in part because of their wish to-- I should say our wish to discover something that was lost. But we were completely taken in and learned a sad lesson. And then of course, we had to write to our colleagues at the Los Angeles County Museum of Art and say oh, by the way, you know that great painting that we told you about in your collection that with so much more valuable than you thought it was, well, it turns out it's a forgery. So with that humiliation, I'll stop and see if you have any questions or comments? AUDIENCE: Could we go back to your [INAUDIBLE]? FORREST MCGILL: Do you want to know or do you want to guess? AUDIENCE: [INAUDIBLE] FORREST MCGILL: OK. Yeah. Well, as best we can figure out, this is the authentic one and this the fake. But it's not absolutely certain on either side. This could be a very, very good fake. And there's some outside possibility that this one is genuine. It's facial features are kind of funny. This motif right there in the middle of its crown is only found on fakes that were made in the 1920s and 1930s. One of the reasons why the Asian Art Museum wants to publish its fakes is of course any time any museum or any collector finds a fake and publishes it, then we can compare against the fakes. And enough of the confirmed fakes of the 1920s, and '30s, and early '40s, enough of them have been seen or published that we're able to recognize certain features like this funny little motif right there, that seem to only turn up in the fakes. So that's very helpful. AUDIENCE: With the cross-example, does that take on its own value as a result of it's ability to appear as if it's authentic and the fact that a paper has published about it and then you're able to trace to the person? So now it has its own value as well, right? FORREST MCGILL: Yes. It's not the great historical discovery that we hoped. But the person who made it was an artist. So it's an interesting aspect of his career, that he's been shown to have had this little sideline in making sort of learned forgeries. And it's quite wonderful painting. I mean I still like it quite a lot. So, yeah. AUDIENCE: And then with the bodies that are ancient and the head put on that's only 100 years old, what is the value? Is it still highly valuable based on the body? And is there like a-- not like a chart, or a price chart, but how do you delineate what the value of all of these things are? FORREST MCGILL: Well in that instance, the value would be the value of the body. And the head is just an extra. And if somebody bought it, they'd decide whether to leave the head on or not. And they might put it in their living room and keep the head as a kind of conversation piece, or to test their friends, or whatever, or they might take it off. AUDIENCE: So you've been referencing sort of-- you just said like '20s, '30s early '40s. So basically this is when there becomes awareness of the notion that there's a market for fakes. And then has this died out or increased? FORREST MCGILL: Oh, the market is flooded. If you go to a dealer or if you look at the big New York and London auctions, in all likelihood 50%, maybe 75%, is very, very, very questionable. AUDIENCE: And the techniques get presumably better than where they are? FORREST MCGILL: Absolutely. And as I mentioned, as conservators find better tests, then the fakers figure out ways to simulate the right test results. So yeah, the fakes are getting better and better. And truly, I mean for a really great piece of Cambodian stone sculpture that would sell for $2 million, it's worth a lot of time and effort for a faker to-- I mean even if they spend two years working on it, it would-- I mean to make a million dollars in-- AUDIENCE: So do you just not buy things? I mean if you've got a three out of four chance that what you would potentially buy would be fake, do you get to these tasks before you buy? I mean like how does a museum create a collection? FORREST MCGILL: Well, right, how do we create a collection? We don't much buy this kind of material any more and neither do other museums. Because the issues of smuggling, and looting, and stealing from countries in Asia is too great. And the Asian Art Museum follows the UNESCO treaty, which is that we have to have clear documentation that the object was out of its country of origin before 1970. And that doesn't mean a letter from your aunt in Switzerland saying yes, I had this. I mean there has to be a really credible paper trail to show that. Collectors do buy things. If they're smart, they insist on very thorough analysis ahead of time. But as I hope you've seen, sometimes no amount of analysis can ultimately answer the question. So there's always a degree of risk. And that's true with-- you know Jackson Pollock, a New York artist of the 1940s, apparently there are numbers of fakes of Jackson Pollack's out there now. And certainly if you were going out to buy a Rembrandt or something, you'd have to be very, very, very cautious about fakes and about the potential of getting an old painting, a genuine old painting that's had a lot of repair or a lot of over-painting, or a lot of doctoring. So if you're a cautious collector, you have to be very aware of that and do your best to check all that out before you get into it. AUDIENCE: So I was curious for your perspective. There's was an article recently about a flurry of new museums in China, many hundreds in a very short period of time. And they singled out a particular museum that had recently seen a scandal about the provenance. Of the 40,000 exhibits, 40 were deemed to be accurate potentially, something on that scale. So if you're trying to build museums or trying to educate your population and share cultural icons, how can you do that in a scalable way in light of the cost, and the time, and the expertise that has to be built over many, many years? What would be your system or an ideal system short of a UNESCO treaty approach? FORREST MCGILL: Right. One good thing is if there's an archaeological dig and interesting artifacts are recovered, in some countries they're all very thoroughly photographed, very thoroughly documented. And then a hundred are sent off to this provincial museum and a hundred are sent off to another provincial museum. And that's good way to do it because A, they're of undoubted authenticity. And B, they've all been recorded and inventoried before they're dispersed. So you don't lose any of the information about what was together in the first place. More and more, museums are borrowing from each other. And that's a good way to do it. We just recently had a visitor from the Portland, Oregon museum. They want to have their first gallery of Indian and Southeast Asian art. And we have a lot of very, very good pieces that are in our storage. They're more than we can display. So they're asking us to consider a five-year renewable loan. And we're inclined to do that. So that's another thing. I mean a lot of museums have thousands or tens of thousands of objects in storage. And if they're good and if other museums want them, then let's get them out of the basement and send them around. AUDIENCE: So in the first example that you showed with a head and a body, you said that you were very clear that the head was fake and the body was genuine. When I looked at it, it did not seem very clear to me. So I was wondering what was the instant tell for you? FORREST MCGILL: Right, well, one-- FEMALE SPEAKER: [INAUDIBLE]? FORREST MCGILL: Sorry. Sure. One of the things that the people in the field always look at is necks. Because heads have often gotten broken off at some point and reattached. Even the real head gets broken off and reattached. So we're always looking at necks. You may not be able to see it in this slide. But if we had this object here in the room, you'd be able to see with your own eyes that there's something funny at the neck that suggests that either a genuine head has been stuck back on or some other head has been struck back on. So when you see that practically glue mark-- I mean it isn't glue marks, but you know what I mean. You see something suspicious at the neck, it raises your suspicion. And then they're a little bit different color. The corrosion on the surface of the head and the body is a little bit different. Now, in itself doesn't prove anything. Because sometimes a head has been broken off early on and has been in different conditions. The body was more exposed to the weather and the head was buried deeper or something like that. So a difference in color or corrosion wouldn't necessarily prove that it's a problem. But it's another little thing to make you suspicious. And then all the decoration on the necklace here, it's like little wire decoration. And the crown has some of that on it too, but it's quite different. And you would be able to see it with your own eyes, if we had the object here to look at. If I pointed it out to you and I said, look at how different the way these kind of wire decorations are put on here from how they are on here, you'd be able to see it. AUDIENCE: You touched on this briefly during your presentation, but I'm wondering if you'd expound on it a little bit more, the idea of there are fakes and then there are also replicas? And so if you look at like a Greek statuary, what we see in museums is actually Roman copies. And your some museums will display replicas right alongside the genuine article. So what is the role in museums for displaying like the real deal versus teaching people about the culture and the object? FORREST MCGILL: Very, very good question. I mean we try to be careful with our language. So forgery means it's a copy that was intended to deceive. If we say "copy," that means we're not sure that it was intended to deceive. The Roman copies of ancient Greek statues, the ancient Greek statues don't survive. So the Roman copies are all that we've got and they're 2,00 years old. So everybody thinks they're worth looking at anyway. And for a lot of the stuff we've been looking at today, as far as we know there weren't copies made until the 20th century. So sometimes there were copies made in the 20th century. You know if you're a pious Buddhist and you see a photograph of a Buddha image that strikes you as very beautiful, you go to your local workshop and say could you make one that looks like this because I want it for my home shrine or I want it to be able to donate to my temple? So that's a possibility. It's more complicated for instance in China operation. Where, as you may know, with "old master" Chinese painting, there's old, old, old traditions of both copying and forgery. So a young artist would make copies not intended to deceive of older paintings as an exercise, to learn the technique and to master the skill. And those certainly are shown in museums. If it's artist B's copy of a work by artist A, and even artist B's copy is 500 years old that's, very interesting in itself. The problem is that sometimes artist B's copy, which might have an inscription on it that says I so and so made this copy in 1520, somebody cuts off the inscription and either lets it go without an inscription or adds a new inscription, trying to make it, after the fact, into an original rather than a copy. So things that started out life as non-fooling copies, if they fall into unscrupulous hands, get repackaged as the genuine article. We try our best at the museum. But if you had been really watching what goes on in our galleries over the last 10 years, you would have seen the labels in some instances going up and down. And you would have seen things disappear because we thought they were genuine and then we got serious doubts about them and we took them off view. And as I say, in our online database we try do to stay abreast of our latest research and to tell the frank truth as best we know it because we think it's interesting and useful to everybody. Thanks a lot.