Week 10 Seminar: The forger's own account

Reading Zhang Daqian's interviews and later scholarship on his forgeries in his own words, and in the words of the collectors he fooled.

10 May 2027

Before the seminar#

Read the linked excerpts: a Zhang Daqian interview passage, a museum’s own account of acquiring one of his forgeries, and a short scholarly piece arguing about how to categorise his work.

In the seminar#

Debate, structured as two sides: forgery-as-scholarship against forgery-as-fraud, using Zhang’s own casework as the shared evidence base rather than abstract principle. Both sides have to use the same facts; the disagreement should be about what the facts mean, not what they are.

Afterwards#

You don’t need to resolve the debate — week 11 deliberately complicates it further. You do need a position of your own, briefly stated, because the final project’s defense in week 12 can reasonably ask you where you land.