Posted By: Bill H
Posted Date: Jul 16, 2020 (07:08 PM)
For all attracted to this subject by the reawakening of this thread, I spent almost a dozen years in and around Thailand, and came away with an assortment of decorative repro Khmer pieces, including this bust said to be Vishnu by the seller, an antique dealer in Bangkok who got sculptures from a studio in Ayutthaya, north of Bangkok. Definitely too clean to be antique I think.
During travels around the Northeast (Isan to the indoctrinated), I was steered to a shop at Dan Kwien, near Nakhon Ratchasima (Korat), where there was a shop that made repros of stone carvings that were cast in local clays to look like the pinkish sandstone of the original carvings. It had started up, I heard, to support the Khmer-themed decoration of a major Western hotel that opened in Korat circa 1990. The shop, well known by that time, remained to serve the tourist trade.
About the same time, I also visited a studio in Chiang Mai that had some huge terracotta Buddha heads standing in the yard. Years earlier, the studio's master sculptor who'd done these faithful recreations based on actual Thai antiquities had been arrested, investigated and eventually cleared of violating patrimonial laws when he'd tried to ship a pair of them to an overseas client.
The faux antique market of course didn't stop with stuff like this but extended to every medium found in local antiques, in large part by a huge enclave of antique dealers and fabricators in Chiang Mai.
Those were the still not bygone days,
Bill H.
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