A forgery can be a laborious undertaking, requiring resources, labor, and knowledge. A literary forgery or hoax is categorically different from thoughtlessly plagiarized text. Indeed, if a plagiarized work steals the words and ideas of others, a forged work studiously invents words and ideas while misattributing authorship. Both plagiarism and forgery are deceptive, but forgery creates even as it deceives. It is generative. In The Forger’s Creed: Reinventing Art History in Early Modern China, JP Park shows how a 17th-century painting catalogue recording details of a non-existent collection generated further forgeries and misattributions and bolstered apocryphal art historical lineages. The history of Chinese art, Park argues, was never the same.
The scholar-official Zhang Taijie published A Record of Treasured Paintings in 1643. The woodblock printed catalogue recorded the titles of 350 paintings supposedly in Zhang’s collection, including paintings from the Tang and Song dynasties, and even earlier. Such paintings would have been exceedingly rare even in Zhang’s day. They were all the more precious because of their purported provenance as paintings once owned by esteemed collectors, including the Xuanhe Emperor of the Song Dynasty. In imperial China, collectors and other viewers would often add their own calligraphy and seals to paintings. Zhang’s catalogue did not reproduce his paintings, but rather transcribed the calligraphic colophons attached to his collected works, providing readers with a record of their viewership.
These colophons were fake. Zhang’s painting collection did not exist. The catalogue was a fraud. Should we thus discredit and ignore it? Not at all.
In three exhaustively argued chapters, Park makes a case for the importance of the catalogue, and forgeries more broadly, to the history of Chinese art. He first provides a close reading of A Record of Treasured Paintings and what it tells us about its maker, his motives, and his methods. He then turns our attention to forgeries of paintings, including extant paintings in major museum collections that can be concretely linked to Zhang’s fake collection.
Finally, Zhang applies insights from the study of literary and artistic forgeries to a reconsideration of a profoundly influential discourse on Chinese painting: Dong Qichang’s theory of Southern and Northern School lineages, which exalted the amateur style of southern literati over the reviled output of commercial and court painters of the north. While this final chapter is less grounded in the central case study of Zhang Taijie’s painting catalogue, it captures the shared milieu of the 17th century, when intense social competition spurred audacious acts of forgery across many arenas of social life. Just as Zhang invented the provenance of his paintings, Dong fabricated aesthetic lineages, while elite families published genealogies recording spurious kinship ties. Some who invented the past did not even bother to hide their tracks.
Some forgers, of course, were motivated by money. But Zhang Taijie, Park suggests, sought more than financial advantage; he wished to present himself as nothing less than “the finest collector and connoisseur in history.” While he failed to earn such regard in his lifetime, his imagined collection outlived him.
The unexpected consequences generated by Zhang’s catalogue turned out to be among the most extensive and profound in the history of Chinese art and literature. Despite the many errors and inconsistencies in A Record of Treasured Paintings, the book and its contents did survive over the remaining years of imperial history.
It survived through reprintings, and it survived through copies and citations of particular passages, which were then copied or cited by others, and not just for the remaining years of imperial history.
Given the ubiquity and infamy of forged paintings from China, it is surprising that Park’s book is, per the publisher, the “first in-depth look at the history and legacies of forgeries in Chinese art.” Park repeatedly provides reminders of why this may be: the topic is sure to ruffle feathers. Park works hard, perhaps too hard at times, to avoid controversy that might distract from his larger arguments. Occasionally, this results in claims that are not backed up with citations. Park writes, for instance,
I have discovered multiple cases of renowned art historians in Asia, North America, and Europe citing content that originally appeared in Zhang Taijie’s book, but most of the passages are credited to references dating to a later period.
Park’s hesitance to identify these cases in the notes is understandable, but also ironic, given his subject matter. Like earlier scholars who cited Zhang’s words without knowing Zhang’s authorship, I can cite Park’s claim, but I can’t trace it to its source.
Can one write a book about forgery without getting perpetually caught up in the weeds of connoisseurship? Park has tried and his book succeeds on many counts. It succeeds in capturing a bygone world, one in which literary and artistic fabrication was the product of intentional effort and deep learning. A forgery can be a laborious undertaking, but in the age of ChatGPT and DeepSeek, it can be something rather less thoughtful, though no less consequential.