VNExpress-June 21
MorningStar in the U.S., Giorgio Auctions in Hungary and Bonhams in the U.K. are the three latest foreign auction houses suspected of selling fake Vietnamese paintings. Ace Le, editor-in-chief of local art magazine Art Republik Vietnam and co-founder of a network of Southeast Asian curators called Of Limits, has recently accused MorningStar eArt Group of selling two fake paintings attributed to the renowned late painters Le Pho and Vu Cao Dam, Giorgio Auctions of selling one silk painting falsely attributed to Mai Trung Thu and Bonhams of another one attributed to painter Nguyen Khai. “All auction houses have been charged with selling fake paintings and in this regard, only differ with each other in terms of degree,” Le, who in recent years has written extensively on his Facebook page to expose plagiarism of Vietnamese art on the international market, says. As more and more fake paintings are discovered, art experts attribute this increasing exposure of fraud to mainstream and social media, which allows the country’s artistic community and public to scrutinize the sales of Vietnamese art abroad. Over the years, whenever there is suspicion, Vietnamese art experts, artists and their families, media agencies, and other stakeholders have at least notified auction houses to re-examine and withdraw the suspected paintings from sale. According to art researcher Pham Long, counterfeiting of Vietnamese works on the international market, which many local experts agree is partly owed to organized forgery rings in Vietnam, began to proliferate when the late Pho became the first artist from the country to cross the US$1-million mark for a work in 2017. Read more at: https://e.vnexpress.net/news/culture/in-the-big-league-more-vietnamese-fakes-sold-at-foreign-auction-houses-4478880.html
