The Museum of Chinese and Ethnographic Art in Parma has scheduled a new exhibition titled Fake, deceived and deceivers from March 9 to June 29, 2024. The temporary exhibition offers a journey into the world of forgery among different cultures. An perhaps unusual path for an ethnographic museum, focusing on the theme of forgery.

The theme of art forgery, as well as historical forgery, has puzzled art critics and scholars since the authorship of a work determines its ultimate value and because the discovery of deception, and the subsequent hunt for the deceiver, makes artistic evaluation a process as intriguing as a spy story.

Even in ethnography and Asian arts, the lines can be blurred, styles confused, and one can easily travel back in time using past styles and techniques with contemporary skill and sensibility.

All 23 works exhibited in this show have been the subject of great debate among scholars in the 20th century, some arguing for their originality, others for their obvious falsity. With this uncertainty, but with a greater inclination towards non-original production, the Museum of Chinese and Ethnographic Art exhibits artifacts normally kept in the vault and therefore unknown to the public. Terracotta and porcelain vases and statues, cups, flasks, watercolor or tempera paintings, or ink on paper, silk or canvas, in which the styles of the Chinese Tang or Song dynasties, as well as reproductions of ancient bronze or wooden statues, or Amazonian ritual diadems in plant fiber, jars, masks, and fetishes from Benin, Congo, and Cameroon, become the starting point for flashbacks that bring ancient rituals or native traditions back to life.

Style, era, and author are the three main paradigms that can determine the falsity of a work. The reflection is therefore centered on beauty, a factor that is not scientific, but of human universality. The production of forgery, which presupposes great knowledge and sensitivity towards the pure and original artistic source, arises from an original beauty and is transmitted in the so-called forgery. Is it therefore of equal beauty? Evaluations and reflections are left to the visitors.