The OCS 2020 Asian Art in London Lecture sponsored by Sotheby’s.

An online lecture by Professor Lü Chenglong, Deputy Director of the Antiquities Department at the Palace Museum, Beijing

Remarks on Applying Traditional Appraisal Methods when Appraising Ancient Ceramics

In his online lecture, Professor Lü Chenglong will explore traditional appraisal methods that have long been used in appraising ancient ceramics, but since they are rather difficult to study, in recent years people qualified to use them are few and far between, and thus gradually there has been a tendency to marginalise them.

Professor Lü Chenglong will take four examples of ancient ceramics in the collection of The Palace Museum whose dating had been wrongly appraised, and will make use of traditional appraisal methods to evaluate them, correctly establishing their period, thus proving that traditional appraisal methods constitute a branch of study, one with scientific features based on good authority, and not a speculative, fake science. At the same time, he will strongly stress that traditional appraisal methods certainly have limitations of their times, and that their theoretical basis was developed and gradually perfected over time. He notes particularly that when identifying certain historical top-level fakes, one cannot resolve the problem in an instant; rather, it is through the constant revelation of new textual and material sources, and through generations of steady efforts to deepen research, that the true historical features of such pieces can gradually be clarified.