Chinese Art & The Law

Yesterday while checking my gmail I noticed a link in the RSS feed at the top of the page to an International Herald Tribune article described as something along the lines of "Chinese investors savvy in the art market." I clicked on the link and it brought me to an article entitled, Souren Melikian: Art casualties from Tibet to Cambodia find an eager market. The article was interesting, but nothing like the description from the RSS. Instead the article was about two recent auctions at Sotheby's and Christie's of art from Southeast Asia and the finest examples coming from Tibet. The catalog for the Sotheby's auction can be found here; unfortunately Christie's does not appear to catalog their catalogs online.

The article focused on the prices fetched by various pieces at the auctions. The 11th century Khmer statue, which has a photo in the article, set a new record for Khmer statues of $2.11 million. The statue was of exceptional quality and had considerable provenance. Provenance is presented as a two-fold attribute: 1) a history conferring legitimacy, and 2) high certainty of original location of the art/antique. The pieces that sold at or above their estimate range tended to have a history demonstrating that they had been in circulation since before the Cultural Revolution, and with a history that placed the pieces originally at certain sites. Pieces that sold under their estimates were of questionable provenance because they were hidden during the Cultural Revolution and the buyers were unsure of where they originally came from, or buyers suspected that the pieces may have entered the market by way of more recent and illicit looting and digging. This could create a legal problem that would force the buyers to handover the antiques to the proper government authorities if it was discovered that they were acquired through illegal means.

Well, this got me thinking about China's laws on antiquities. The best general outline of the issues and laws that I found was in a Comment in the Cardozo Arts and Entertainment Law Journal, THE GREAT MALL OF CHINA: SHOULD THE UNITED STATES RESTRICT IMPORTATION OF CHINESE CULTURAL PROPERTY?, on pages 937 - 944. The author writes that there are three main issues in "China's cultural relic problem:"

• "[R]apid economic development."
• Helps cultural relics by making China a "market nation" for its own cultural relics, but...
  
• Urbanization, including the Three Gorges Dam, has led to the destruction of many cultural sites.
• "[T]omb robbers and illicit smuggling."
• "[D]isturb[s] the integrity" of the art in a way that the careful cataloging and documentation of archaeological digs does not.
• "China's lack of domestic control capabilities."
• "There is a distinct gap between Chinese national policies and practice."

The author points to three national civil laws and regulations, and one criminal law that Beijing has promulgated to protect their cultural relics.

• 2002 Law on the Protection of Cultural Relics
• and it appears that this law was updated in December of 2007, and is available at LawInfoChina
  
• Regulations on Enforcing the Law on Cultural Relics Protection (available at LawInfoChina for a fee)
• Provisional Rules on Administering the Auction of Cultural Relics (available at LawInfoChina)
• Part 2, Chapter VI, Section 4 of 1997 Criminal Law

There are also several municipal laws that have been promulgated with regard to cultural relics. The author notes that none of these laws have been on the books long enough to substantiate their efficacy. My problem with these laws is I found it real hard to discover the law on what I would actually need to know: what could I actually buy, and could I get it out of the country?

Some website says that there are a bunch of different regulations and all you can really do is rely on the legal advice of your Chinese antique dealer on whether you can export the antique, and hope it clears the obligatory trip to the Customs Office. The same site says that you can export wood antiques of any age out of the country, but antiques made of Red Sandalwood, Yellow Rosewood, or Chicken-wing Wood can't be exported if they're older than 300 years. Then some other site said you can't export wood if it's older than 1789. It gives me a headache.

It sounds like all you really can do is rely on the legal advice of your antiques dealer, and if you're buying something "old enough" it might be a bit of a crap-shoot getting it out of the country.