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Hi,

I just bought this (in my view) fantastic stone head in khmer style. Given the price and lack of provenience I was fairly certain it was a fake/copy and good for decoration only. However, after looking closely I can conclude:

1) it is (sand?)stone and not molded
2) it is fairly harshly chipped from its neck
3) it is as far as I can tell chiseled using long swiping movements (when looking closeup in shadows small lines/groves can be seen in the surface)

I attached some photos and would love to get some input and guesses. Is around 25 cm (10") high.

So... first of all is it just a good fake?

Even so, can anyone elaborate on the style?... For example how common the hair, slight mustache and earrings are, who the head likely depicts etc.

What would a real piece like this be worth?

I doubt it's real but its still a beautiful piece of art.

Thanks in advance!

I live in South East Asia, Thailand to be exact, at the moment. I had been living in Cambodia for a number of years. These heads are everywhere, in all the street markets. They occasionally turn up in the flea markets around Thailand also. The back streets of Bangkok is full of them.

This is not to say however, that yours is not real. It appears to be based upon the heads that adorn the temples of Angkor Wat and many of the lesser known temples such as Preh Vihear. There was a lot of looting took place before the temples were "rediscovered" by the French.

I've come across a few similar pieces in the past, then again I have also bought Ban Chiang pieces, that according to the market trader are "very old". A smile is usually the response I give, though I might be wrong and I might be turning down a true historical find. Who knows? All part of the game.

Richard

Great imitation antique Khmer sculptures like this have been produced in Thailand and Cambodia for decades. They are sculpted from sandstone and then aged in various ways. In the 1980s-90s there was a guy in Bangkok who was a master at this who was interviewed in a Bangkok arts magazine. He said the pieces he made were labeled as "new" when he sold them (not cheaply!), but as they were resold they sometimes ended up in prestigious museums in Europe, North America, and other countries, labeled as genuine.

Having said that, your example here is quite convincing and I would not be surprised if it was indeed the real deal. It would need to be examined by an expert, and even then, who knows?

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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