“Authentic” Forgeries: Chang Dai-chien and Chinese Copies

June 16, 2026

Left: Chang Dai-chien, Four Geese attributed to Bada Shanren, hanging scroll; ink on paper

Right: Zhu Da (Bada Shanren), Four Geese, hanging scroll; ink on paper

By Lena Rohde

Since the development of an English-language field of Chinese art history, scholars have grappled with the relationships between Chinese artists and the practice of copying, lauded by Chinese artists for centuries as an essential step in developing one’s own style and skill. This can involve closely copying an original, applying personal interpretation to one, or using a past master’s style to create a completely new image.^[1] With recent history being no exception to witnessing these practices, how should the art market treat these ambiguous creations and how can one understand the artists who created them?

Chang Dai-chien, China’s Picasso

To investigate these questions, one can turn to one of the most renowned artist-forgers: Chang Dai-chien (or Zhang Daqian), also known as “the Picasso of China.”^[2] Born in 1899, Chang studied art in China and Japan but left mainland China in 1949 to travel and live abroad for the rest of his life.^[3] He was by then a high-profile figure in the art world for his character and skill alike, creating art in both great quality and quantity with about 30,000 of his artworks left behind upon his death in 1986.^[4] An unknown but surely vast percentage of that oeuvre consists of forgeries.

In a notable 1999 Washington Post article by John Pomfret aptly titled “The Master Forger,” Pomfret recognizes Chang as both “arguably, China’s greatest modern painter” and the country’s “most accomplished con-man.”^[5] As Pomfret describes, a 1989 discovery uncovered a box of Chang’s containing 475 inscribed Chinese seals; most of them turned out to be fakes. These would have been used by Chang for his forgeries, which he created not only to enhance his artistic skills and challenge past great masters, but also to financially support himself and his multiple families.^[6]

Chang’s forgeries were creative, calculated productions involving a wealth of knowledge around traditional Chinese painting materials, techniques, styles, and history. He carefully selected which works to forge, often based on holes in the canon, and precisely enhanced or altered certain elements so as to increase financial value or visual appeal.^[7] Rather than only directly copying, Chang enjoyed exploring ancient models as modes of personal artistic expression.^[8] A quote from one figure outlines Chang’s mentality towards forging: “He would say, I am not a forger, I improved it actually. It is my painting. One hundred years from now, maybe you’ll think my painting is better than the original.”^[9]

The Smithsonian Institution’s 1992 Chang Dai-chien exhibition elaborates, writing “The notion of ‘buyer beware’ is stronger in China than in the West” as it is more so a buyer’s responsibility to recognize authenticity than a seller’s to guarantee it.^[10] It is even noted that in certain circumstances within China, forgery has traditionally been admired and is integrated in the practices of multiple renowned master painters.

Trouble at the Riverbank

Increasing awareness of the quality and quantity of Chang’s forgeries instilled a nervous undercurrent in the art world, with former Sackler gallery curator Joseph Chang even estimating that “today every major collection of Chinese art has a Chang forgery in its midst.”^[11] Even the British Museum believed that they possessed a work by 10th-century artist Juran which was found to be a Chang forgery.^[12]

This occurrence became quite relevant when in 1997, the Metropolitan Museum of Art arranged to receive a painting referred to as Riverbank through the prolific financier and art dealer Oscar Tang (namesake of the Met’s upcoming Tang Wing). Tang purchased the work from C.C. Wang, another renowned member of the American scene for Chinese paintings, who had acquired Riverbank directly from Chang Dai-chien.^[13] In this deal, Tang promised to include the piece in a donation to the Met, which was finalized in 2016.^[14]

The Met attributed Riverbank to Dong Yuan, a pivotal 10th-century master of landscape paintings to whom very few early attributions survive.^[15] However, not all art historians accepted this.

James Cahill, a figure deeply embedded in the 20th-century development of Chinese art history in America, was at the heart of the controversy surrounding Riverbank. According to him, his fellow scholar Hironobu Kohara was likely the first to officially question Riverbank in 1977, when it was already an immensely valued artwork described as the “Mona Lisa” of Chinese painting.^[16]

At that point, Cahill had been aware of Chang’s forgeries for two decades, having continuously studied them and followed their presence across the art market, and he became certain Riverbank was by Chang. Cahill recounts that the Met went ahead acquiring Riverbank despite the doubts vocalized by him, Kohara, and others, which were soon publicized in an article by writer Carl Nagin.^[17]

Nagin’s piece incited a flurry of heated responses, to which Nagin counterargued with defenses by him and others including former director of the Cleveland Museum and established curator of Chinese painting Sherman Lee, who said “the Met made a huge mistake” and “any idiot can see this is a fake, and if you can’t see it, I can’t help you.”^[18]

Nagin also suggested the vitriol towards Cahill’s opinions “arouses suspicions that something more than pure scholarship may be at stake” for some of the experts involved.^[19] The variously proliferating arguments culminated in the next development: a symposium scheduled for December 11, 1999 addressing Riverbank’s authenticity.

The Symposium’s (Lack of) Results

Despite attracting a large crowd of attendees, the symposium was inconclusive: ultimately, the Met experts stood by their opinions, and Cahill by his. The Met even released a publication on Riverbank before the symposium, whose scholarship one reviewer felt was weakened by efforts to neatly explain and aggrandize the painting’s significance to a degree unsustainable given the work’s “spotty documentary record.”^[20]

In a 2012 correspondence with Cahill’s friend and fellow expert on Chinese art Jerome Silbergeld, the two men agreed that the cast of the symposium was stacked against Cahill and skewed in favor of the Met’s position.^[21] Cahill remained adamant that the painting was a Chang forgery, and felt that his new research on the topic warranted a re-assessment by members of the original symposium. He was frustrated that this research received a total lack of response.

While Silbergeld was unconvinced by Cahill’s new research, he considered the Met’s suggestion of Dong Yuan having possibly painted Riverbank ridiculous. He also commended Cahill for standing up to what Silbergeld refers to as “the metropolitan-princeton ‘in-crowd,’” with both scholars alluding to various other experts that agreed with Cahill but had not publicized their opinions.^[22] The messages between Cahill and Silbergeld further unravel the nuances that muddle the painting’s origins, but they also point to the larger frameworks in which debates of authenticity transpire. Ultimately, the Riverbank symposium and the controversy around Cahill’s accusations paint a vivid picture of the tense atmospheres and complex dynamics surrounding authenticity in the art world particularly those cases involving Chinese copies.

Riverbank Today

The Met has firmly held onto Riverbank in spite of its lurking shadow of inauthenticity. In 1999, Holland Cotter described the stakes for the Met: “If ‘Riverbank’ were proved beyond reasonable doubt to be what the Met believes it to be, the museum would own one of the most important Chinese paintings in any collection.”^[23] He alternatively suggested that not only would the value of the painting decline if proven to be a fraud, but also the public’s trust in the Met and its curators.

Today, the Met website makes no allusion to any controversy regarding Riverbank. They accept a modicum of uncertainty by listing the work as “Attributed to Dong Yuan” rather than decisively by him, and the page describes Dong Yuan’s style and importance without explicitly claiming that he painted this piece, but the implication lingers.^[24]

Upon Tang’s formal gift in 2017, former Met CEO Thomas Campbell said that by donating Riverbank, Tang “has added a uniquely important treasure to the Met’s holdings and, in the process, further enhanced the Museum’s stature as one of the preeminent collections of Chinese painting in the world.”^[25] The Met and its curators are well aware that their chosen attribution, which though not impossible has not been decisively validated, greatly augments the painting’s monetary and art historical value.

What would change, then, if Cahill’s attribution of Riverbank was proven true? In 2011, Chang Dai-chien surpassed Picasso as the art market’s top-selling artist, with overall sales of $506.7 million, and he exceeded sales by all artists, living or dead, in 2016 with auction sales of $354 million.^[26] In 2022, Chang’s most expensive work to date, Landscape after Wang Ximeng (an “acknowledged copy” using creative reinterpretation), sold at auction for $47 million.^[27] It is difficult to imagine that a work’s value would decline completely if revealed to be by Chang Dai-chien.

Integrating Forgeries into the Institutional Canon

The growing market of Chinese art in America has thus required Western audiences to become more aware of and comfortable with the nuances of Chinese copying practices. As Cotter states, “authenticity means different things in different cultures.”^[28] Having built a formidable reputation upon his original works while simultaneously profiting from his forgeries, it seems that Chang’s undeniable talent provided the key for Western audiences, some of whom express notable discomfort at the notion of an artist having duped the public and profited from it, to reconcile Chang’s dual identity as artist and forger.^[29]

The Smithsonian, whose 1992 catalogue thoroughly explored this background, has openly integrated Chang’s forgeries into the National Museum of Asian Art’s collection.^[30] Similarly, American exhibitions of Chinese art have actively incorporated Chang’s forgeries to provide nuance and intrigue to Chinese art history and questions of authenticity, such as the Boston Museum of Fine Arts’ 2007 show Zhang Daqian: Painter, Collector, Forger, or one gallery’s 2020 exhibition Authentic or Forgery: How does a Chinese Connoisseur Work?^[31] Evidently, Chang’s forgeries have become “authentic” in their own right.

Alternatively, some larger Western institutions acknowledge Chang’s history of forgery only to the minimal extent needed for the sake of associating themselves with his esteemed reputation. Currently, the Met possesses about 21 objects by Chang Dai-chien. Of these, one is listed as being “after Shitao” with a descriptive piece briefly mentioning Chang’s skill for Shitao forgeries while also stating the importance of his “acknowledged copies,” thus leaving some ambiguity as to which of those two categories this painting falls under and potentially outlining a hesitance on the museum’s part to actively refer to works in their collection as forgeries.^[32]

Two other works in the Met’s collection are listed as “attributed to” Chang Dai-chien but “after” other known early artists, but neither of the works’ pages clarify the nature of the paintings in relation to forgery or copying.^[33] Somewhat similarly, while San Francisco’s Asian Art Museum has proudly publicized their acquisitions and exhibitions of Chang’s works, they make little to no outward reference to his engagements with copying and forgery.

Meanwhile, Chang’s acclaim has grown to a point of meriting his own forgeries. The MFA Boston, whose collection is littered with works “formerly attributed to” named or unknown artists that are now credited to Chang Dai-chien, also includes at least one forgery of a Chang work.^[34] As another anecdote tells, a collector’s acquisition was accused not of being a forgery by Chang, but rather a forgery of Chang’s own style; Chang himself then approved it as authentically his.^[35]

Conclusions – The Value of (In)Authenticity

Though Western scholars and museums alike have been forced to grapple with Chang Dai-chien’s status as a major forger, it is clear that many larger institutions still hesitate to emphasize that aspect of Chang’s background. Were Chang any less of an undeniably talented artist, it may be that his prolific forging would have prevented him from reaching his current levels of mainstream success.

However, being as skilled as he was, Chang has become a fascinating case to study how blurred the concept of authenticity can be in the art world. Given his current fame, it may even be that, as Chang himself predicted, some collectors would prefer an “authentic” Chang Dai-chien forgery to an “authentic” older work by an unknown artist. He certainly applied just as much of his knowledge, ability, and notable creativity to his forgeries.

The ethics of profiting off of artworks that consumers believe to be something they aren’t may still be debated, but it is evident that Chang’s forgeries themselves can still hold value, whether as artworks by a famous painter, records of past compositions and styles, or simply skillful paintings in their own right. Either way, what Chang Dai-chien’s case decisively proves is the persistence of copying practices within Chinese painting history, which the West must accept in order to properly educate itself on and collect Chinese art.

About the author:

Lena Rohde (Center for Art Law Summer 2026 Intern) recently obtained her M.A. in the History of Art and Archaeology from the Institute of Fine Arts at New York University, and completed her undergraduate studies in 2024 at the University of St. Andrews with a degree in Honors Art History and French. She is interested in cross-cultural exchange, museums and collection dynamics, image rights and licensing, and provenance research.

Select References:

1. Shen C. Y. Fu, Challenging the Past: The Paintings of Chang Dai-chien, University of Washington Press (1991) p. 34, available at https://archive.org/download/challenging-the-past-1-3/Shen%20Fu.Challenging%20the%20Past%20%28Ch.%201%20%26%203%29_text.pdf ↑
2. Mark Johnson, Of Color and Ink: An Intimate Look at Chang Dai-chien after 1949, Sotheby’s (Nov. 21 2023), available at https://www.sothebys.com/en/articles/of-color-and-ink-an-intimate-look-at-chang-dai-chien-after-1949 ↑
3. Chang Dai-chien, Asian Art Museum ↑
4. John Pomfret, The Master Forger, The Washington Post (Jan. 16, 1999), available at https://www.washingtonpost.com/archive/lifestyle/magazine/1999/01/17/the-master-forger/e2a6cc6a-c60d-4abc-9d6a-c4540c0f1076/ ↑
5. Pomfret, The Master Forger ↑
6. Fu, Challenging the Past 22 ↑
7. Forgeries of Bada Shanren Album, National Museum of Asian Art ↑
8. Fu, Challenging the Past 15 ↑
9. Pomfret, The Master Forger ↑
10. Fu, Challenging the Past 35 ↑
11. Pomfret, The Master Forger ↑
12. Ed. Judith G. Smith and Wen C. Fong, Issues in Authenticity, the Metropolitan Museum of Art (1999), available at https://libmma.contentdm.oclc.org/digital/collection/p15324coll10/id/82263 ↑
13. Pomfret, The Master Forger ↑
14. Id. ↑
15. The Met Receives Monumental 10th-Century Chinese Painting Riverbank from Oscar L. Tang, The Metropolitan Museum of Art (Mar. 2, 2017), available at https://www.metmuseum.org/press-releases/riverbank-2017-news ↑
16. James Cahill, CLP 53: 2002 “Riverbank as a Chang Dai-chien Forgery.” published in Japanese in Geijutsu Shincho, May 2002, James Cahill (Feb. 2002), available at https://www.jamescahill.info/the-writings-of-james-cahill/cahill-lectures-and-papers/56-clp-53-2002 ↑
17. Ibid. ↑
18. Ibid. ↑
19. Pomfret, The Master Forger ↑
20. Peter Sturman, Review: Along the Riverbank: Chinese Paintings from the C.C. Wang Family Collection, Artibus Asiae (2000), available at https://www.jstor.org/stable/3249945 ↑
21. James Cahill, Correspondence With Jerome Silbergeld About Riverbank Revelation, James Cahill (2012), available at https://jamescahill.info/other-peoples-writing/correspondence-with-jerome-silbergeld-about-riverbank-revelation ↑
22. Id. ↑
23. Holland Cotter, ART/ARCHITECTURE; On Trial at the Met: The Art of the Connoisseur, The New York Times (Dec. 5 1999), available at https://www.nytimes.com/1999/12/05/arts/art-architecture-on-trial-at-the-met-the-art-of-the-connoisseur.html?smid=url-share ↑
24. Riverbank, The Metropolitan Museum of Art, available at https://www.metmuseum.org/art/collection/search/39542 ↑
25. The Met Receives Monumental 10th-Century Chinese Painting Riverbank from Oscar L. Tang, The Metropolitan Museum of Art (Mar. 2, 2017), available at https://www.metmuseum.org/press-releases/riverbank-2017-news ↑
26. Liza Eliano, As Chinese Artist Unseats Picasso, New Collectors Rise in China, Hyperallergic (Jan. 13 2012), available at https://hyperallergic.com/zhang-daqian/ and Oscar Holland, Why this Chinese artist is outselling Van Gogh, CNN (Jun. 12 2022), available at https://www.cnn.com/style/article/zhang-daqian-picasso-of-east ↑
27. Holland, CNN ↑
28. Cotter, On Trial ↑
29. Holland Cotter, Review/Art; Restating and Adapting Images of China’s Past, The New York Times (May 15 1992), available at https://www.nytimes.com/1992/05/15/arts/review-art-restating-and-adapting-images-of-china-s-past.html ↑
30. Bada Shanren Album, Sleeping Gibbon, The National Museum of Asian Art, available at https://asia.si.edu/explore-art-culture/collections/search/edanmdm:fsg_F1991.7a-s/ and https://asia.si.edu/explore-art-culture/collections/search/edanmdm:fsg_S2002.6/ ↑
31. Authentic or Forgery: How does a Chinese Connoisseur work?, Fu Qiumeng (2020), available at https://fuqiumeng.com/viewing-room/8-authentic-or-forgery-how-does-a-chinese-connoisseur-fangyu-wangs-research-on-bada-shanren/ ↑
32. Paintings after Shitao’s “Wilderness Colors,” The Met, available at https://www.metmuseum.org/art/collection/search/65060 ↑
33. Wenshu Terrace in the Yellow Mountains after Mei Qing, Through Ancient Eyes after Shitao, The Met available at https://www.metmuseum.org/art/collection/search/49801 and https://www.metmuseum.org/art/collection/search/49800 ↑
34. Vimalakirti, Drinking and singing at the foot of a precipitous mountain, Landscape, MFA Boston ↑
35. Kayan Wong, Strong demand for Zhang Daqian continues in Hong Kong, with 3 masterpieces totalling US$16.1m at Sotheby’s, The Value (Apr. 9 2024), available at https://en.thevalue.com/articles/sothebys-hong-kong-zhang-daqian-paintings-2024-spring-sales-result ↑