[shunyadragon]

I follow the Chicochai forum and over time there is a very contentious hot topic. It is how apparent tremolite/actinolite crystals appear to form over abraded carving lines on ancient jade carvings. these structures are sometimes used to justify the appraisal that a jade carving is genuine. A widely held conclusion is that these crystal structures grow on the carving in the burial environment. It is true that the alkaline environment of decaying bodies can cause secondary weathered deposits called calcine, but calcination is low temperature and near-surface pressure weathering process. Calcination can be reproduced on fake carvings in a relatively short time by burying recent carvings with dead anjmals. The growth of tremolite/actinolite crystals require a high pressure/low temperature (still much hotter than surface temperatures) found in the subduction zones under the oceans where nephrite is formed.

I have the following possible explanation. The hardness is possibly variable on the long slender fibrous tremolite/actinolite crystals. Nephrite is an interlocking matrix of actinolite/tremolite crystals. The actinolite/tremolite properties have a hardness rating of 5.0 to 6.0, some nephrite is harder up to 6.5. One side of the crystal may have a hardness close to 7.0 because of the variation in the silica structure part of the crystal may be exposed. Other sides of the crystal structure may be softer with a hardness as low as 5.0. The tools used to carve ancient jade may have a hardness of about 5.0 to 7.0. some drills were made of nephrite. The tendency of carving by abrasion would be to leave elevated crystal surfaces when they are harder than the matrix. The tendency over time is that the hardness of the tools, steel and modern abrasive tools made of diamond, and later carvings in the Qing and modern carvings will lack these raised crystals in the carving lines. The differential weathering of the soft areas of the nephrite matrix may also contribute to the weathering of the softer matrix revealing crystals.

I am interested in any references, comments, suggestions, and even pictures concerning this subject.

This post has been edited by shunyadragon: 27 October 2008 - 09:14 PM

[Kenneth]

Chicochai is a dubious venue in itself to talk jade. Take a look at the jades they sell. Now consider that the forum was made for its patrons.
...rumour has it: to make them feel better about spending more.
One of the people who created the forum {Terry Young} since learnt all his jades were fake. He went from a hero to an outcast there.
That is what truth does. He then realised that ancient jade is rare, and very seldom availible, and very expensive.
He had bought something different. Fakes.
He sold his pieces at a big loss {sold them by weight IIRC} and declared this publically, and his 'pals' were then hostile to him.
He now runs an antiquties museum in Texas, minus those fakes. The Richard Nable collection is there: The Young museum.

You should know my feeling on the claims of crystal expansions on jades if you read the forum archives on Chicohai (mid 2004 or so).

The main issue is that the pieces they use to show this 'raised crystal' effect are not authentic jades!
Hard to escape from that.
Their answer: these are real. They have crystals. Nothing else matter stylistically.
Stylistically the pieces can have very serious issues, and most people at a glance who look at excavated and museum pieces will see little resemblance in the private collections of literally hundreds of items that the believers there possess.
The defense? The jades in the British museum & Chinese museums are the fakes, say they. Seriously.
When you see them laugh at the Hong Shang jades in collections like Sir J. Hotung you really know you are on the fringes of common sense...they laugh since they don't look like the ones they bought.

Let alone economic factors & supply issues the size of their collections leads to a simple conclusion about their sources.
Their answer to material reality? Ancient jade is common, and cheap, and freely availible outside China.
(...and there was me thinking that it was a prestige item in ancient times, very valuable, and seldom ever reaches the markets of the West!)
Odd also that the market supplies jades to such westerners for cheaper that a Chinese might pay for it in Beijing.
(Would a dealer really smuggle a piece out to sell for >$100 if he could sell it for a hundred times more in China?..the price & supply of ancient bronze shows this not to be the case. Bronze prices have risen dramatically due to Chinese demand & jade is even rarer and more valuable than bronze or ceramics. Fact).
Their answer though? ..Only they know what real jades look like, and there is a conspiracy by the antique market to exclude their type of jades.
Such logic is how a single list member can have 1,000 Hong Shan jades, and have more than all the museums of the world put together (!), and yet not be interested in considering how many jades are actually yeilded archaeologically per tomb to make that total.
One major Hong Shan site for instance yeilded a dozen quality jades, and this was celebrated. The actual archaeologist (Gou Dashun) who made the discovery saw that forum members jades in person and said that they were not real, that the carving and styles were wrong....but the member did not believe the archaeologist and did not for a second doubt his collections authenticity.
Are these people insane?

Now is it important if the same person can point to a crystal on those pieces in their collection?
Is it important to deduce the mechanism by which is occurs?
Not very.

Another issue..how long to grow these crystals? Oddly a piece called Song and a piece from Shang or Neolithic looks like having the very same surfaces on many of the forum displayed pieces. They even look like the same stone type...
My conclusion? The fakes are all given the same treatment. They come from the same factory.
It doesn't take long to grow the crystals. The output is plentiful.
These are not fakes that fool museums, they are fakes that fool fools.

On bronze for instance I seldom find discrete cystalisation on pieces much less than 2,000 years old, and that is on a material that really does corrode and produce a patina since such mineral formation of the components is the natural state geologically. (Casseterite, Cerrusite, Malachite, Cuprite, Malachite, etc).
Nephrite on the other hand can often escape with little or no alterations over huge periods of time, yet the jades on that forum uniformly have an aged (and contrived) appearance.
So, jades that are ancient do not always look heavily altered with age, but on the market you might expect a jade to be heavily altered to look ancient.
For this reason a pattern emerges about the jades shared by the small group of 'jade pals'.
The patterns of alterations are so consistent, and regular even on a single surface. This alone is a sign of a fake as alterations are seldom regular and even vary accross a single piece... let alone collections.
Even the simple calcinations and recrystalisations on those jades do not match authentic appearances & surface distrubutions.
The claims by the believers? That is because the pieces in Chinese museums are the fakes, they say. Seriously.

Try finding an example of this re-crystalisation on a provenanced piece.
It hasn't been done.

The answer is thus:
1) There is no evidence that crystal growth actually occurs on authentic pieces, and certainly not in the extreme and consistent form some sellers of jade can supply. The only academic commentary on 're-crystalisation' was apparently flawed by the study of market pieces (A. Tsien). Solid provenanced jades have not been compared to these pieces.

2) There is evidence that crystal growth (or at least 'raised crystals') occurs on fakes! Some of the jades on Chicochai are simply stylistically wrong for their age. This means that the crystals are no indicator of authenticity, and rather that the reverse is more likely to be true.
Raised crystal=dubious item.

How this occurs (or is manufactured) is not so much the issue as the two above truths.
Take for instance some Zhou swords supposedly from Xian, carved from jade, which were shared on that forum by a prominent member.
I was very unpopular for pointing out the errors with the swords (very ugly at best, and more like fantasy pieces) and the odd fact that one was clearly a kukris in form, (a ghurka knife) in jade, and another was a serrated and very distinct sword called a Rajput sword (in jade) which is an Islamic ceremonial sword also called 'sword of the prophet'.
The Rajput sword style, for it very clearly was one, originates around the 17th century AD...so does the fact that these surfaces looked OK to the owner, just like their other pieces, perhaps with the same sort of crystal growths, mean that I either trust the 'expert' (dealer) on the authenticity of their other jades....of which hundreds of Liangzhu monstrosities are their niche....you might know who I mean. Look for the jades with taotie masks carved on to all sides.
It didn't matter to them though. It did not register. Such people don't believe Gou Dashun so what would my identifications count for!

Really, the site attracts some very very weird sorts...I know collectors & antiqutarians...but they are something quite unique there.
Maybe jade attracts the weirdest. I have met some very nice & good folk through jade but I have not found the same sort of unbalanced collectors in other niche areas as I have in that field.

I have seen some really dopey stuff there. Mish-mash pieces taken from 2 different real jades & joined, ugly interpretations of known pieces, really silly openwork plaques, motifs repeated ad-naseum, huge bulbous jades the size of watermelons (take a look to see the sizes and widths of real ancient jades...) Pieces that mistakes have been made with so that the carver obviously misunderstood the original, even stamp-seals where the characters had been carved on backwards so they couldn't be used.
Try not to step into a steaming pile of such antique jade...

Danger Will Robinson! Danger!

This post has been edited by Kenneth: 21 January 2009 - 06:52 PM

[Pattie]

Kenneth, on Jan 21 2009, 06:41 PM, said:

even stamp-seals where the characters had been carved on backwards so they couldn't be used.
Try not to step into a steaming pile of such antique jade...

Growing up, my father collected paper money. Saddle blankets, specifically. The one that eluded him for years (his Holy Grail) was called a Lazy 2. The day the drought ended, he bought not one but three. Two were counterfeits! We were over the moon with delight.

I started collecting presentation scarabs (think ancient wedding favor) a skillion years ago, but only fakes. The kinds that are passed through geese to age them. My favorite, by far and away, is the one where the inscription ends in a question mark.

^__^ Ah, those wacky Egyptians.

But, getting back to the topic...I don't think the issue of authenticity is half as interesting as the effects that can be perpetrated on stone. Can't we dub them orphans, as so often happens in Cycladic art, and examine the "jade" itself? Someone had to discover the means of 'applying' the secondary growth; how cool is that? Human ingenuity is amazing.

[changsham]

Hi, I agree ancient jades are very hard to get. Is one of the biggest fakes industry in China. That website sell modern copies and fakes. Things that would be worth 5 figures at least if genuine. Faking age and patina is common on all sorts of antiques from stones, ceramics, and metals and just about everything else.

I tend to avoid and ignore jade because of all the fakery around. Similar things are happenging with antique ceramics. Modern technology has improved the fakers art. I would suggest others to avoid jade unless they have access to knowledge, expert advice and most importantly provenance. Major reputable auction houses(Sotheby's, Christies, Bonhams) are always the best source but be prepared to pay high prices. Its OK to buy quality new jade done by master carvers but only if represented for its true age.

This post has been edited by changsham: 21 January 2009 - 11:00 PM

[Kenneth]

I agree. Of a group of fake jades I have an antique dealing friend of mine said that you cannot call them artefacts, but you can appreciate their art.
The actual attractive ones I gave away as gifts though so I mainly have the chunky looking so-called neolithic fakes.
If jade manufacturers didn't try to decieve, and there wasn't a risk of fooling people (or museums), then faithful reproductions could be a thing of beauty in themselves. I have seen some private collections displayed by museums which were not authentic, some were nothing like authentic, so there is potential to damage peoples perceptions of what Chinese jade is.
Unfortunately fakers often distort the original art, so even ornate & complex fakes seldom seem to have the class or the 'life' that the original artists could invest.
If people made faithful copies though, but openly declaring them as modern, then I am sure there would be a market for such fine looking pieces.

Far better to collect jade carving by modern artists then. These can be very appealing and intricate. The amount of different designs to choose from at jade markets is astounding & so there is little reason to buy the antique style pig dragon or bi that a dubious character might offer, when you are 99.99% likely to be getting a fake.
I don't recommend collecting ancient jade. Even nice folk who share their collections tend to have dubious looking pieces. Sometimes I don't have the heart to tell them my opinion, but normally I do.
Let alone people who buy items that don't look correct, even if you did buy an item that looked correct there is no real garuantee is is ancient. Carved stone is hard to appraise. I know there are supposed judgements by experts, but these are quite subjective. One interesting thing I heard from one authentication scientist that I do consider very capible is that ancient carved jade can have a different appearance to the surface under UV light, almost velvety looking they said.
Personally I find the appearance of the so-called calcination (although not actually calcite but a change of structure of the nephrite) would be a good indication on some jades, but many either have too much alteration or no such alteration for this trick to work, which involves wetting the jade to percieve the underlying colour.

I have only seen jade that I was pretty sure was ancient & at an obtainable price in the West a couple of times in the last several years. Perhaps I haven't really sought it out, but it is very very seldom offered along with bronze or ceramics. It tends to be purchased very quickly even before it reaches the market.
One such jade I saw happened to be a tiny anthromorphic figure, a few centimetres tall (instead of grapefruit sized like the fakes). I pointed it out to one jade collecting friend & he asked if I would bid. I let him bid unopposed, and he must have liked what he got...since he posted out a couple of bronze swords to me some time after that, as gifts. The swords alone would have been more valuable that his winning bid so he must have gotten a surprise treasure at a good price from my tip-off.
I do know for instance another time he bought a $100 jade axe from an estate auction of a deceased American, and then got it appraised by a prominent jade expert and then sold it off for $10,000.
Yeah, there is some occasionally stuff around if you take the risk and spend a long time looking.
It is rather like a lottery though, unless you want to pay tens of thousands of dollars per piece.

One other story of some jade turning up unexpected is a friend in Hong Kong bought a bucket of debris and scrap from a Hong Kong antique dealer. He said that dealers get packages with good stuff & junk mixed in. The dealer picked out the good stuff & just sold off a bucket with little pieces of bronze all encrusted in dirt, and only pieces that seemed low value.
This friend had a really good look, and broke apart some of the pieces of earth that were in the mix & he found several small pieces of ancient jade.
Lucky him....

[Pattie]

Kenneth, on Jan 22 2009, 04:40 PM, said:

Unfortunately fakers often distort the original art, so even ornate & complex fakes seldom seem to have the class or the 'life' that the original artists could invest. If people made faithful copies though, but openly declaring them as modern, then I am sure there would be a market for such fine looking pieces.

The problem there is, no artist is a copy machine. I did a collage not too long ago, really liked it and decided to make several of them. While the applied pieces were very similar, each was different. (Hmm...I should scan those in....) Does that mean that, years from now, the authenticity of my unsigned work will become an issue? IMO, a forger would do their best to mimic the original without making an identical copy; i.e. you can't sell a forgery of the Mona Lisa if she's still hanging in the Louvre.

Quote

Far better to collect jade carving by modern artists then.

Which flexes several worthwhile muscles. It promotes an artist (or consortium), a legitimate industry, and gives an injection of life to what could be a dying skill.

While in Egypt we had the "opportunity" (read: tourist trap) to buy carved alabaster. Our choices were hand-turned or machined. Which do you suppose we bought?

Quote

I don't recommend collecting ancient jade. Even nice folk who share their collections tend to have dubious looking pieces. Sometimes I don't have the heart to tell them my opinion, but normally I do.

You sure you're not from New Jersey?

Quote

even if you did buy an item that looked correct there is no real guarantee is is ancient.

Which calls the dealers' rep and cred into question. Jade that's fallen off the back of a truck can be had on eBay with no effort, but there you get what you pay for.

[changsham]

You can sell a forgery or copy of the Mona Lisa. There are many ancient copies about and some attributed to well known artists of the 16th-17th century. Some are in museums. There has even been debate and controversy over which is original and if perhaps Da Vinci did more than one copy. These copies because of ther age and quality do have a substantial commercial value.

The reputaion of antique jade has really suffered a lot because of fakes. More so than other antiques. At the lower end is poor quality jade, other stones or plastics misrepresented as jade and antique. As seen on Ebay, tourist traps and in many antique shops.

At the top end is new genuine quality jade which has its own substantial value but is misrepresented as antique in order to increase value.

As for antique dealers, I would say the overwhelming majority in China are dishonest to a degree if they can get away with it. When I feign ignorance I am always fed blatant lies and bull.

This post has been edited by changsham: 23 January 2009 - 06:55 AM

[shunyadragon]

changsham, on Jan 23 2009, 02:49 AM, said:

You can sell a forgery or copy of the Mona Lisa. There are many ancient copies about and some attributed to well known artists of the 16th-17th century. Some are in museums. There has even been debate and controversy over which is original and if perhaps Da Vinci did more than one copy. These copies because of ther age and quality do have a substantial commercial value.

The reputation of antique jade has really suffered a lot because of fakes. More so than other antiques. At the lower end is poor quality jade, other stones or plastics misrepresented as jade and antique. As seen on Ebay, tourist traps and in many antique shops.

At the top end is new genuine quality jade which has its own substantial value but is misrepresented as antique in order to increase value.

As for antique dealers, I would say the overwhelming majority in China are dishonest to a degree if they can get away with it. When I feign ignorance I am always fed blatant lies and bull.

I was not aware of the bad reputation of this business and the Chicochai forum website. Like everywhere I saw some questionable carvings and discussions on jade. The carvings appear to be of very high quality, but I guess they may be to good to be true. I still definitely believe it is impossible for secondary growth of crystals of the tremolite-ferroactinolite mineral series (nephrite minerals) to form under these conditions and consider it most likely that they are other low temperature crystal mineral growth or crystal relief of harder mineral structures left by softer tools, if they are truly the nephrite minerals.

This post has been edited by Pattie: 13 August 2009 - 09:26 AM

[Kenneth]

Pattie, on Jan 22 2009, 09:25 PM, said:

The problem there is, no artist is a copy machine. I did a collage not too long ago, really liked it and decided to make several of them. While the applied pieces were very similar, each was different. (Hmm...I should scan those in....) Does that mean that, years from now, the authenticity of my unsigned work will become an issue?

IMO, a forger would do their best to mimic the original without making an identical copy; i.e. you can't sell a forgery of the Mona Lisa if she's still hanging in the Louvre.

Which calls the dealers' rep and cred into question. Jade that's fallen off the back of a truck can be had on eBay with no effort, but there you get what you pay for.

It was interesting to hear of Egyptians passing small items through the gut of an animal. Chinese have been excelling at making archaic-style fakes from Song times, and burying an object inside a carcass and letting it rot is supposed to produce a surface on jade the matches a mortuary jade. Putting bronze under the earth and peeing on it for months, or suspending in a latrine or burying in a salt marsh can induce corrosion.
There are many ways to coax out rapid alterations. Heat and chemical for jade, or selecting certain stones that have a weathered look from the onset.

The artist is no copy machine, but an artist creates a certain type of work. A certain period favours a certain type of artwork.
There are themes in ancient art that had meaning at the time, and so certain styles relate to certain periods and paradigms. The ancient artists did not make perfect copies. They could not if they tried, but the hand made pieces still share something.
This is a type of cultural conservatism that could be called 'fashion'. I think you misunderstand the types of forgeries I mean where pieces don't look like the ancient originals.
I mean that a fake takes an element, or several, and combine them on a piece that then does not reflect the original objects feeling or purpose at all.
Some motifs are overdone to excess, so they end up being distasteful. Some are also plainly wrong or silly.
Most fake jades availible are not even good copies of ancient art.

Consider fake branded clothing, with spelling mistakes. It is much the same. You can see what it is meant to be, and see the logo, but it doesn't take long to figure out that is not a real Nike jacket, or whatever, the stitching shoddy and the price is only a fraction of the real thing. 'Ancient jade' at the low end is much the same in quality.



It is not so grey a judgement to make as you might think, when deciding if the object matches an ancient artists 'fashion'.
Some fake pieces that are made by modern people you can see exactly what they have done, where they took inspiration from, but it doesn't mean that they at all captured the original. They are made to fool novices, and not art historians.
A fake to fool an art historian requires much more effort...and they are unlikely to be sold cheaply after such effort!
Basic fakes are made to be recognisible, by taking a base style from something in a museum, but that is all they need to do to fool a tourist or newbie. It doesn't require being able to capture the living essence of a period or the power of an original ancient carving. It just requires a basic form & not perfection of stylistic details.


Try a glass of Hello-Cola.

About e-bay and 'fallen off the back of a truck', I am not sure I understand you. That expression means 'stolen' (we would say tomb robbed if it was ancient) but the jade that people buy & sell is made in a factory by somebody with a high-speed tool being paid $5 a day.
If they were real they might be stolen, but they are not. Authentic offerings are not freely availible but you could say thay people that buy artefacts, or those that buy fakes through ignorance, do not deserve much pity.
People who buy quite small sums thinking they are getting a 4,000 year old work of art do get what they paid for. You are correct there.

This post has been edited by Kenneth: 26 January 2009 - 09:14 PM

[changsham]

Hi Kenneth, I generally agree with your comments. One area where fakers get things wrong is because they use a modern eye, technique and concept of time in creating their works. For instance if we look at beauty. What was considered beautiful a thousand years ago may not register. A modern painter would subconciously paint a face or carve it how he sees beauty in the modern fashion. Also old pieces always have an unhurried timeless look about them. Whether in brush strokes, carving or potting. Modern works nearly always show hurriedness in execution. Time is money these days. A lot of fakes also tend to be more elaborate because the modern eye sees this as appealing. Older works are usually much more simpler and elegant because of the limitations of tools. This was compensated for by excellence in execution and style. Modern tools makes elaborate pieces easier to make with all the difficult and tedious work quickly done by machine. Only the rarest and most expensive pieces showed elaborate carving in olden times.


I have been looking at antiques for many years and usually style and workmanship are the most important clues to my eyes in identifying age and authenticity. The very best fakers have the ability and expertise to understand eye, technique and time when they make their pieces. But these take a long time and extrordinary skill levels hence very expensive to make in the first place. Only their rare works have the ability to fool the best experts. The lesser fakers rely mainly on making thing look old by applying patina, dirt or other effects of aging.

This post has been edited by changsham: 26 January 2009 - 09:32 PM