In The Forger’s Creed, J. P. Park analyzes the exponential increase in art forgery in the late Ming and its reverberating effects on practices of art history from that time onward. His underlying premise is that even the scholar-elite needed to demonstrate acumen in collecting and appreciating art in order to assure their social prestige; by the late sixteenth century, merely passing civil examinations or even holding office had become insufficient. Along with the weakening enforcement of the early Ming’s rigid class hierarchy and sumptuary regulations, the rise of an educated urban population with money for leisure pursuits created a demand for new ways to establish and display cultural prowess. A variety of players in the art market seized the opportunity to cater to these needs, resulting in a large-scale production of paintings and calligraphy attributed to famous masters, often with testimonials of authenticity and importance purportedly written by renowned connoisseurs and cultural luminaries. Alongside this flood of fakes and forgeries made to oblige an affluent public’s desire for prestige goods, enterprising publishers also issued illustrated catalogues and painting manuals for novice collectors and aspiring artists, an area of publication that Park explored in a previous study.Footnote ¹ Here his focus is on A Record of Treasured Paintings (Bao hui lu 寶繪錄), an astoundingly ambitious book that purports to transcribe over 1000 inscriptions on hundreds of paintings allegedly owned by its author, Zhang Taijie 張泰階 (b. 1588, jinshi 1619). Park’s intensive investigation of the text revisits a very long article he published in 2022.Footnote ² The study draws from a range of recent Chinese scholarship as well as his own observations.

The discussion opens with an entertaining Prologue about a sophisticated parody orchestrated by the late James Cahill (to whom the book is dedicated) as a birthday gift in 1952 for Max Loehr, his teacher in Chinese art history at the University of Michigan. Together with several colleagues in East Asian Studies circles and William A. Lewis, a Michigan professor of art, Cahill concocted The Train Scroll, depicting a train traveling through an improvisational landscape painted in a stereotypical literati manner with allusions to famous masters. They then mounted the painting as a handscroll with a monumental title frontispiece, inscriptions, seals, and colophons, including two purportedly by noted late Northern Song collectors. At the party to present the scroll, Loehr “completed” it by intoning the texts and translating them on the spot, as an ideal literatus-recipient might have done. This inspired spoof serves in The Forger’s Creed as an analogy for the production and reception in Ming times of so-called Suzhou fakes, which typically included concocted documentation to frame the painted subjects and encouraged owners to imagine themselves as participating in elegant pursuits. The story was previously recounted in an article that Park and James Cahill himself published jointly in 2011.Footnote ³

The brief Introduction, “Zhang Taijie, the Greatest Art Collector in Chinese History?,” provides basic information about Zhang and his catalogue, which included about 350 works (not counting album leaves separately) allegedly by eighty-seven esteemed masters. Pointing out the odd fact that Zhang did not describe the paintings themselves but just transcribed their more-than-1000 colophons attributed to 53 mostly famous men, Park observes that the contemporary art market placed a premium on paintings bearing such attestations, a premium reflected in prices; moreover, books of colophons had become popular in the late Ming because they were interesting to read. Nonetheless, it was evident to careful readers, such as the eighteenth-century compilers of the Siku quanshu, that Zhang had invented these supposed paintings and concocted their seemingly impressive documentation himself. Although he was a jinshi from an illustrious Songjiang family that had produced generations of office-holders, Zhang had only a middling official career before retiring in 1630 to Suzhou, the epicenter of the art market, where he became a publisher in order to reinvent himself as an art collector and connoisseur. Park suggests that Zhang also sought to profit financially by having paintings made based on some of his catalogue entries, probably after the fact.

Once published, A Record of Treasured Paintings offered a font of art-historical raw material that continued to be useful to other writers, whether they were unaware of its falsity or were deliberately using the Record to concoct venerable pedigrees for new forgeries of their own. Many paintings of imaginary events that had come to epitomize cultural ideals, such as Elegant Gathering in the Western Garden and Orchid Pavilion Gathering, were produced in response to the market’s demand for prestigious subject-matter, and the fictions were reified through repetition. The Introduction also previews Park’s contention, developed in a later chapter, that the class-based and non-geographic “Northern and Southern Schools” theory of painting, associated with Dong Qichang 董其昌 (1555–1636, jinshi 1589), was motivated by a need to distinguish elite from common taste in order to combat the “democratization of artistic leisure” (8). By formulating two lineages that assigned earlier painters to either the lofty “Southern School” of literati artists or the vulgar “Northern School” of professional artisans, Dong created a “fictitious art history” comparable to the forgers’ “art-historical fiction.” By championing Southern School artists, Zhang Taijie’s monumental catalogue of forgeries contributed to their ascendancy in art-historical discourse and practice well into the twentieth century.

Chapter One, “The Literary Remaking of the Past,” begins with a brief summary of textual forgery going back to the Zhou dynasty and asserts that reinventing the past can be creative and historically influential. As others have observed, the late Ming saw immense amounts of textual chicanery, including cut-and-paste plagiarism and the appropriation of famous names to raise a publication’s profile.Footnote ⁴ In the preface to his own compendium, Zhang Taijie cannily states that he would have preferred to catalogue his collection of calligraphic rubbings, but it was not yet complete, so he took out his painting collection to document instead. By having this preface printed in semi-cursive calligraphy and insinuating that he had an even more prestigious collection awaiting cataloguing, Zhang aimed to impress his audience with his refinement (23–24). He composed the 20-juan catalogue in three phases, corresponding to divisions within the text. The first part contains a general statement and commentaries on painting through the ages, as well as biographical information about some of the painters and colophon-writers allegedly housed in his Pavilion of Treasured Paintings (Bao hui lou), which he probably had not actually built (29). The second part purports to record paintings formerly owned and inscribed by Song Emperor Huizong (1082–1135) and subsequently acquired by the Yuan literatus Yuan Jue 袁桷 (1267–1327), which are given colophons that track their transmission into the mid-Ming. The third and largest section comprises several other collections supposedly acquired by Zhang and includes detailed documentation for paintings whose recent provenance nonetheless would have been hard to verify. Although many of the paintings are credited to famous early artists, they had never been recorded previously, suggesting that late Ming demand for early works stimulated their supply—as forgeries (38). Or, perhaps Zhang simply invented them.

To demonstrate Zhang’s methods in more detail, Park analyzes the entry for a work called Immortal’s Chalet on Jade Island (Yaodao xianlu tu 瑤島仙廬圖), purportedly by the enormously revered Six Dynasties painter Gu Kaizhi 顧愷之 (ca. 344–ca. 406). Although not mentioned in any earlier publication, this scroll allegedly bore inscriptions by a series of major artists, collectors, and connoisseurs from Song Huizong through Wen Zhengming 文徵明 (1470–1559). This documentation affirmed not only the scroll’s importance but also gave it a prestigious transmission history, which ended with Zhang himself without clearly identifying the immediately preceding owner (40–43). The same famous names often appear among the fanciful colophons “authenticating” the paintings that were pouring out of Suzhou’s forgery workshops, and likewise the alleged authors’ frequent insistence that the paintings were genuine works of the masters. Zhang claims to have paid astronomical prices for the paintings, but not one of them cost less than his entire annual salary as an official (51). Without explaining his reasoning, Park reads this mismatch, plus Zhang’s cross-references within his catalogue, as evidence that he intended actually to create the paintings after publication, the better to promote himself as a great collector. Park then describes various creative ways that Zhang concocted the entries, sometimes by adapting genuine earlier records and changing a few names and dates, and inevitably making careless mistakes.

Although some Qing critics noticed that the texts in A Record of Treasured Paintings seemed to share a single “voice,” despite supposedly recording the comments of many different writers over the centuries, Zhang’s catalogue was reprinted several times and continued to be consulted. Sometimes passages were quoted by later writers who did not realize that its information was made up, and then others might use these excerpts without knowing their origin. Park traces several examples of such “source laundering” through later catalogues of painting and local gazetteers, and discusses a related phenomenon in late Ming inventories of book collections (56–62). Integrating recent Chinese scholarship on the details of specific fabrications in A Record of Treasured Paintings, he argues that the catalogue had ongoing influence because its entries were (and still are) quoted, excerpted, remixed, and otherwise repurposed in new projects, whether of forgery or sincere attempts to reconstruct the history of painting.

Chapter Two, “To Deceive is to Believe: Paintings Forged,” pursues the distortions introduced into art history by the inclusion of fakes (defined as doctoring or replicating an existing object) and forgeries (a new creation that is falsely attributed to someone) (64 and 166n2). While Zhang Taijie’s enterprise was virtually unique for creating paintings to instantiate his massive literary fraud, chicanery in both realms had appeared many centuries before the late sixteenth century. In the late Ming, however, owning the work of a famous master became “a social necessity for the new urban class in southeast China” (66), and bogus paintings were much cheaper than genuine masterpieces. The forgery business became so widespread that writers such as Li Rihua 李日華 (1565–1635) and Shen Defu 沈德符 (1578–1642) discussed it without denouncing it and even named some master forgers. The late Ming boom in art-related publishing greatly aided forgers by providing information on painters’ biographies, styles, and subjects, which was useful for concocting convincing deceptions. Recorded titles inspired the production of paintings that could be passed off as long-lost originals. Books reproducing seals provided examples to copy in fabricating impressive pedigrees. In addition to newly created forgeries, older paintings that were either anonymous or by less-known artists could be given a famous master’s “signature,” vastly increasing their market value (79–81). Paintings on paper typically had several layers that could be separated during remounting, and the ink and pigments that had bled through from the top layer onto a lower one could be touched up to create a duplicate (81, 86). Park enumerates (and illustrates) several extant examples of deception, detailing myriad schemes and clever strategies for producing and “authenticating” them, sometimes even with cooperation from the purported artist. He asserts that paintings created by Zhang Taijie were rarely recorded in seventeenth- and eighteenth-century catalogues but suddenly emerged in nineteenth- (and early twentieth-) century collections, then disappeared again from view, although a few have come up in recent auctions and sold for high prices (94–96). Park offers no explanation for this pattern.

In the last section of Chapter Two, Park lays out a detailed case questioning the authenticity of Rustic Delight in an Autumn Grove (Qiulin yexing tu 秋林野興圖) as the earliest surviving painting by Ni Zan 倪瓚 (1301 [elsewhere 1306]–1374), the quintessential late Yuan master (103–109). Now in the Metropolitan Museum of Art, it bears a date corresponding to 1339, not only more than a decade earlier than Ni’s next extant paintings but also depicting figures in a compact landscape painted with wet and dense brushwork, radically unlike his stereotypically dry and sparse style (although Park perhaps unfairly compares it with the 1372 Rongxi Studio, a much later painting that was hastily and sketchily executed). Based on documentary records, Park finds it improbable that an authentic early painting by a highly revered artist with several inscriptions from the fourteenth to sixteenth centuries (including a second inscription by Ni, dated 1354) would have gone unrecorded before appearing in six seventeenth-century catalogues, including A Record of Treasured Paintings. But the situation is complicated, not only by complex relationships among these records but also because the alleged fourteenth-century inscriptions are entirely separate from the compositional space of the painting and clearly have been rewritten over a coating applied to very damaged paper, perhaps a replacement; a separate sheet above this contains the later colophons, one of which insinuates that the painting displays Ni’s early style. Seals and a colophon by the modern master-forger Zhang Daqian (Chang Dai-chien, 1899–1983), a previous owner, arouse further doubts. Declining to draw the obvious conclusion,Footnote ⁵ Park ends the discussion by introducing other works related to Rustic Delight in an Autumn Grove, some linked in various ways to A Record of Treasured Paintings. He concludes by affirming that the catalogue “clearly contributed to the textual and visual networks that spawned numerous other forgeries in Chinese history,” functioning as a “node” in a “hypertextual environment” (111–112).

Returning to the theory of Northern and Southern Schools in Chapter Three, “Inventing Traditions,” Park calls the division of painters into two lineages, artisan-professional and scholar-amateur, a “fraud” of “bogus theories,” no less deceitful than forgery in literature and painting. He argues that Dong Qichang and others concocted a dichotomy between a “truthful/legitimate” lineage vs. a “phony/illegitimate” one in order to “affirm their place in a rapidly changing socio-cultural environment” (114). This argument seems overly polemical. While Dong surely did consider professional masters to be socially inferior to scholar-painters, his own status as a high official and noted artist and collector was not in doubt. Moreover, Park’s contemptuous treatment does not give credit to Dong’s genuine ambition to become a great painter by absorbing, responding to, and finally transcending the achievements of the Southern School masters he admired.Footnote ⁶ Nonetheless, Park offers a useful analysis of the convoluted reasoning by which Dong and others reconstructed long-lost or imagined works and styles of revered ancient painters, which forgers then obligingly produced and later writers codified into the canonical history of painting (115–125). As Park points out, the value-laden terminology of a Northern–Southern binary and the genealogical structure of an orthodox succession followed patterns that were already well established in Ming literature and thought (133–139), as well as responding to sixteenth-century “social and cultural transformations” that blurred class distinctions (140–143). Accordingly, he portrays the fabrication of a prestigious artistic lineage, the Southern School, as a power-move to restore them.

In the very short Conclusion, “Zhang Taijie, Dong Qichang, and the Carnival,” Park points out the seeming anomaly of Ming elite critics taking full advantage of the art market while disparaging its newer participants, the “emerging leisure class” (145). Drawing on Mikhail Bakhtin, he likens the world of Ming forgery, where “anyone could appreciate and collect art … and distinctions between real and fake became blurred,” to the medieval European carnival, “a temporary liberation from the prevailing truth of the established order” (146–147). Zhang Taijie produced “hundreds of masks for the carnival of forgeries … Dong Qichang ingeniously altered the very rules of the game, thereby ensuring that the victory remained exclusive to him and his fellow elite class” (147). One might argue that by identifying the “good” masters and teaching his own followers to imitate them, Dong opened the “game” to a wider class of players in future generations.

Park writes clearly and fluently, making the book a stimulating read. His observations will be most meaningful to art historians who are familiar with the examples he discusses, but other readers may appreciate his lines of argument more generally. It is commendable that the paintings he discusses are reproduced in color (thanks to generous subventions from the Geiss Hsu and Chiang Ching-kuo Foundations), although some images are too small to support the point they are meant to illustrate (and they are larger and clearer in Park’s Archives of Asian Art article). Chinese names and terms are listed in a separate Glossary, but the wide-ranging and lengthy Bibliography does not include characters or translations of titles, just romanization, which is not always sufficiently informative. The index seems thorough and useful.