What is covered, week by week, and which topics each lecture draws on.
Every lecture the course claims to run gets a dated page and a teaching-team
reference. A course decides how many lectures it needs; one of them carries a
real deck. related: connects lectures to the sessions and assessments they
feed.
Why Tang Yin
The scale of the problem this course spends a semester on, and the case for using one painter's oeuvre to teach it.
Week 1 · 22 February 2027
Jianding: the discipline of deciding
The Chinese connoisseurship tradition, and James Cahill's split between its "verbal" method and a "visual" one.
Week 2 · 1 March 2027
What the object is made of
Paper, silk, ink and pigment as evidence that doesn't care what anyone's eye thinks it sees.
Week 3 · 8 March 2027
Reading a hand
Brushwork as the connoisseur's primary evidence, and why it's also the hardest kind to defend in writing.
Week 4 · 15 March 2027
Seals: carved, collected, forged
Why a seal is often more informative than a signature, and how seal forgery actually gets caught.
Week 5 · 22 March 2027
Colophons and the paper trail
Reading collector inscriptions and catalogue entries as documentary evidence, in the spirit of kaozheng textual criticism.
Week 6 · 29 March 2027
The Suzhou pian economy
How a forgery market actually operates --- workshop production, demand, and the paintings that eventually outgrew the label "fake."
Week 7 · 19 April 2027
One painting, argued both ways
A single disputed scroll, worked through with the whole toolkit, as a rehearsal for the dossier.
Week 8 · 26 April 2027
What a model sees
Stroke-level machine learning as a second, tireless opinion --- and exactly what it can't tell you.
Week 9 · 3 May 2027
The forger as artist
Zhang Daqian, who forged well enough to fool the field he later joined, and what that does to the ethics of the fake.
Week 10 · 10 May 2027
The six as-ifs
Tang Yin's own Buddhist sobriquet, the Diamond Sutra line behind it, and what illusion has to do with authenticity.
Week 11 · 17 May 2027
Defending a verdict
The last lecture: what the final project asks for, and why a defended verdict still matters after week 11.
Week 12 · 24 May 2027