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Museum to hold seminar on jade

The head of the National Palace Museum (故宮博物院) said that the authenticity of ancient artifacts would be verified through academic discussions at a seminar the museum will sponsor this month.

Museum director Tu Cheng-sheng's (杜正勝) comments were in response to questions from DPP lawmaker Chen Chin-jun (陳景峻) on Thursday that more than 400 costly objects on display at the museum were of dubious quality.

"We [museum officials] are fully responsible for the authenticity of the artifacts exhibited at the museum because the museum budget comes from taxpayers' money.

"Nevertheless, I need to re-emphasize that these are academic issues and have to be clarified by means of academic discussion," Tu said.

"For this reason, the museum has organized a seminar on Dec. 13 and 14, which will be attended by 64 jade specialists and 136 art connoisseurs, with an aim to clear the air regarding allegations of the quality of the jade objects at the museum."

Tu said that the jade exhibition was being held, in part, as a way to earn the trust of the public by showing what sort of objects the museum has.

More than 800 jade objects purchased by the museum since 1997 are currently on display. To better compare the quality of these pieces, the museum has borrowed a stone palette and a jade tiger from the Qing dynasty from the Academia Sinica's collection.

A museum official said the stone palette was borrowed to compare with its counterpart kept by the museum, which was alleged by Chen to be a fake.

Teng Shu-ping (鄧淑蘋), a curator specializing in jade at the museum, said that the evaluation of jade requires substantial professional knowledge and training.

"In many cases, differences between real and counterfeit objects are tremendously hard to identify. Specialists need to use a microscope to examine an artifact to evaluate whether it is an ancient piece or a recently made copy," she said.

Chen on Thursday had said that he had purchased jade objects cheaply from the local market that were carbon copies of those in the museum's collection, which cost considerably more.

Teng said that she welcomed Chen to bring his pieces to the museum so they could look at them with qualified experts on jade.
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