Week 3: What the object is made of

Paper, silk, ink and pigment as evidence that doesn't care what anyone's eye thinks it sees.

8 March 2027

Style can be imitated; a sheet of paper’s fibre composition is much harder to fake convincingly, because a forger has to source period-correct material before a single brushstroke goes down, and most don’t. Paper and silk carry physical evidence a connoisseur’s eye never sees directly: fibre type and weave under magnification, the specific mineral and organic content of ink and pigment, wear and repair patterns consistent (or not) with an object’s claimed age.

None of this is decisive on its own — a forger working from period paper stock, which happened often enough in the Suzhou pian workshops, defeats a purely material argument — but it is the one class of evidence in this course that doesn’t depend on anyone’s trained eye at all. That is exactly why it’s taught first: it gives you a check against your own stylistic judgement in weeks 4 and 6, rather than a judgement that has to trust itself.

Outline#

• paper and silk: fibre, weave, and what a period mismatch actually proves
• ink and pigment chemistry, and the forger’s countermeasure (using genuinely old materials)
• what physical evidence can rule out, and what it can never rule in, on its own
• reading for next week: a short set of materials-analysis case reports, linked from the seminar page