Week 1: 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.
22 February 2027
Tang Yin (1470–1524) was already being forged in his own city while he was alive to see it. Suzhou workshops turned out paintings signed with his name and stamped with convincing copies of his seals for a market that wanted “a Tang Yin” more than it wanted a Tang Yin, and that market never really closed: the same workshops kept going for two centuries after his death, under a label — “Suzhou pian,” Suzhou fakes — broad enough to cover everything from crude knock-offs to paintings good enough that they later entered the Qing imperial collection as genuine.
That is the reason this course exists. Not because Tang Yin is an unusually interesting painter — he is a very good one, but so are a dozen of his contemporaries — but because his afterlife is an unusually complete case study in how authorship gets contested, decided, and sometimes never resolved. Everything the field has for deciding “who painted this” shows up somewhere in his catalogue raisonné: contested seals, forged colophons, paintings whose attribution has flipped more than once in print, and a scholarly literature willing to argue in public about all of it.
Outline#
- the scale of the problem: what fraction of “Tang Yin” is actually Tang Yin, and why nobody agrees on a number
- what this course teaches instead of art history as usual: a set of evidence types, applied to a running set of disputed cases
- the shape of the semester: materials, style, seals and colophons build a toolkit; the market and a real case study test it; computation and the forger’s own craft complicate it; the last two weeks ask what any of this is actually for
- what leaves week 1: the two piles of reproductions for the first seminar, and the question you’ll be arguing against by week 4
Teaching team
- Marisol Quaye — convenor