When I first moved to China, I always knocked on the backstreet and the road. In my exploration, I bought a few old teapots. Personally, I always rely on my own judgment to buy art. I created my own art in many media; I bought my first ceramic art in 1970. I study art. I have friends who are artists. I have been dealing with various forms of art since my first purchase [only sold when I sold my country hotel, in 2000]. I didn't spend a lot of money on those teapots, I like them. It turns out that they are fakes of the very famous teapot art, so I didn't leave the mark in my old teapot appreciation.
Over the years, I have learned a lot about old and new knowledge about the Yixing purple teapot in China. It turns out that for old teapots, many people started making replicas [fakes] of old teapots and aging them [the tub was full of dirt; then it was dry]. In fact, I am familiar with the basic techniques of making furniture and folk art reproductions and other businesses that buy and sell genuine goods. For example, to make old painted furniture, we used old nails and milk paint and buried it in the feces for a week. Brass can be aged by placing it in an ammonia atmosphere. Then, we only use old glass with bubbles to make antique cabinets. The key is that this is nothing new. Over the years, people have been making fakes and replicas of various art forms.
In a teapot, the situation is much worse in many ways. First, in the past few hundred years, the way artists have been signing teapots has been to use stamps from artists or factories that have their Chinese characters. The name, sometimes, is a bit stylized. The stamps are usually placed at the bottom of the pot and appear to start from the Gongchun teapot. After that, there are also marks under the cover and under the handle, albeit with changes. We have also heard of a tradition that the direction of the seal should be along the axis of the handle and the nozzle facing forward, but we have seen that certain rules have also been violated. Before the late 1800s, it was common to see engraving fonts on the surface of teapots. Some specific details also apply to certain periods. In the 1940s and 1950s, wooden seals used Chinese characters but no actual names. In the 1960s, a cooperative was established, and all teapots were only added to China.
However, it is also common for artists to place their seals under the cover during this time. During the Cultural Revolution from 1966 to 1976, artists were not allowed to put their seals on the teapot, but instead were assigned some numbers. The key is that the stamp can be easily copied from the original stamp on the original teapot, which can also be done with engraved letters. Before the 1960s, the impression of the original seal was made of red wax, which made the seal of the seal slightly smaller. These days it is done by computer. In contrast, for example, it is much more difficult to falsify the written signatures of Chinese or Western artists, although this is not impossible, and many of the past artists' fake paintings have appeared over the years. In fact, the use of black light can sometimes help reveal fakes in painting.
Next is the material. As I mentioned, when we make copies of furniture and folk art, we use nails made by the company in the same way for 200 years. We use milk paint, which is the same for hundreds of years. Then, we can also get antique hardware, and we can even get planks for hundreds of years. Then, we used our own home finishes to complete a variety of works, using the same materials used to make finishes for hundreds of years. In the teapot, there is old clay because, for example, the teapot artist family has been buying clay from the Yixing mine for many years, and some of the clay has been passed through for generations. However, one of the real differences between old clay and old teapots is that the size of the rock powder that makes up the clay is about twice that of the middle of the Qing Dynasty, three times that of the early Qing Dynasty, and about five times that of the Ming Dynasty. So, at least you should expect the teapot to look rougher and the farther you go, although even the latest pieces can see the same roughness.
Another thing about the teapot is that although the actual original teapot of the famous artist has a clear appearance, this is only an approximate situation. First of all, since each is handmade, it may be slightly different from one to the other, albeit small. Second, nothing compares to the "signature" brushstrokes observed by a famous artist in the art of oil painting. For example, we recently saw a copy of a contemporary teapot used by a contemporary artist. Technically, it has no errors, but according to our knowledge of the original, the signature is placed in an inappropriate place. In fact, we could have bought this copy, but its price is also higher than the price we paid for the original. More importantly, part of the actual learning process for making Yixing teapots is to copy part of your mentor and other famous artists, so the copy masterpieces are even incorporated into the art teaching system. We even have an artist friend who specializes in making replicas of famous teapots, although he won't sell them as replicas. We see other famous, not so famous copies of contemporary and past teapots. According to our sources from distributors and our sources, in Yixing itself, more than 90% of famous brands or antique teapots sold in the past few decades, as originals, are actually fakes, especially those that are For sale to those foreign buyers. We have seen similar figures in other articles on antique teapots.
Yixing teapots have been sold to other parts of the world for hundreds of years, and European tea companies are shipping tea to European countries. Even as early as the late 1600s, Dutch and British potters made fake Yixing teapots because the teapots imported from China were all the rage. Others were also shipped to Asian countries, for example, gongju teapots to Thailand. Therefore, it is not impossible to find the old Yixing teapot outside China, except for those teapots that have not been shipped abroad but were later purchased by foreign buyers of mainland sellers. However, for products shipped in the early centuries, you must first discover that not many products are shipped, and that few survive, because most people don't think they are special, and ceramics are easily broken. Even the Sunbeam Tiger car of the 1960s that I owned in the 1990s was only one-third of the original surplus, only twenty years later. In addition, teapot artists are rare over time; today, we have thousands of things that produce a lot of teapots. Therefore, in the past few decades, Yixing teapots purchased by Chinese foreign buyers have been considered quite suspicious by most of us in China today.
In fact, we have recently contacted a foreign seller who said he wants to sell his approximately one hundred antique teapots to China. In the past few years, many foreign sellers have sold their teapots through local auctions because they know that there are price bubbles in certain sectors of the teapot market. The seller sent us photos of some fairly common teapots over the Internet. He told us to show them to any dealers and they immediately knew what they were. Now, we are not experts in antique teapots, but we know some, in the dealership and Yixing multi-generation teapot art family. We also saw thousands of old teapots and new teapots in the many teapot dealers, stores, studios and galleries we passed. We see fakes sold as fakes and fakes as fakes we know. In fact, we saw a similar teapot somewhere in the roaming, but we also sent these photos to our experts. What we get is a waste of time ridicule.
Finally, making a copy is part of the art itself, and copies and fakes have been around for centuries. The first replicas of the twentieth century were actually commissioned in the early 1900s by several respected companies in Yixing and Shanghai. They had a copy of the early famous teapot made by the best artist of the time, originally intended as a replica. Often, those that appear in circulation are provided as true in the next few years. Due to the increase in foreign demand caused by the normalization of cross-strait relations, various teapots began to show another wave of counterfeit goods in the 1980s and continue to this day. In fact, China is now known for its copy of everything, and we see a variety of things being copied, from cigarettes to iPods and so on.
Of course, like any other art, the source is the key to buying new and old teapots. For newer teapots, the artist is actually a handwritten certification, which is their teapot and can be passed from one owner to the next. It's like the publisher's certification for the 20th century prints of famous artists. This is an extreme. However, we even met a contemporary teapot artist who told us that he met a Taiwanese man at an exhibition in New York City, he...
Orignal From: Antique Yixing Zisha Teapot Market - Analysis
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