Spotting Fake Chinese Bronzes

By: Amy Page

February 2002

LONDON—Fakes are an ever-increasing problem for collectors of ancient Chinese bronzes. According to Anna Bennett, head of the Center for the Scientific Investigation of Works of Art at London University, forgers have become very sophisticated in producing credible bronze copies made in the Shang, Warring States, Han and T’ang periods.

One way to determine a bronze’s authenticity is to look at the metal’s oxidation, which occurs over a long period of time and is not easy to simulate artificially. “Until a few years ago metal analysis was pretty clear-cut because a piece either had corrosion or it didn’t,” Bennett explains. “But, in the last three years in China, they have been using a low electrical current to simulate corrosion not associated with a chemical attack. So we were all fooled for a while.” Bennett says she was “fairly quick” to catch on and has since alerted experts at major institutions, including Tom Chase, a fellow of Washington, D.C.’s Smithsonian Institution, Peter Meyers at the Los Angeles County Museum of Art and Dick Stone at New York City’s Metropolitan Museum of Art. “We now see a sort of fingerprint on this corrosion and, when you know what to look for, you can pinpoint it.”

Although museums have been warned, the discovery has not been widely publicized because they do not want forgers to abandon this technique for a more sophisticated one. “It is to our advantage at the moment,” Bennett says.

Just how widespread are fake bronzes? Bennett says the pieces she sees have been edited by the time she examines them, but approximately 50 percent are fake. Therefore, she estimates, roughly 90 percent of the bronzes on the market are not what they are cracked up to be. For more information, e-mail Bennett at atnbennett@yahoo.com.