When eight-year-old Annie Lin goes to bed every night, she sees fabulous dragon-like creatures circling overhead. “I stare up at them and imagine what would happen if those dragons jumped on me from above, scorched my face with fire, and burned me into black charcoal,” she says. Annie’s bedtime scenario may sound like a nightmare, but it’s actually a playful and proud description of her bed: an imposing Ching dynasty structure with an ornately carved openwork ceiling that dominates her tiny room.
The slim L-shaped strip of space that borders the bed is also filled with unusual furnishings: a country-style kitchen cabinet that has been transformed into a wardrobe, a pair of straight and simple Ming-style wooden chairs, an old table used as a study desk, and a hard stool that keeps Annie upright and alert while she’s doing her homework. Her museum-like bedroom showcases but a small part of the antique Chinese furniture that her parents, Peter and Lorraine Lin, have been collecting for the past ten years.
Even the Lin family kitchen is full of old furniture. The narrow kitchen, like something straight out of the traditional Taiwan countryside, is lined with a creaking antique kitchen cabinet, a restored egg and vegetable cupboard, and ceramic urns that were once used for preserving vegetables. In contrast, the master bedroom is decidedly more ornate. As in Annie’s room, the main feature is an elaborate Ching dynasty bed enclosed by side panels and an openwork ceiling in a bold geometric pattern. This is surrounded by a well-preserved cabinet holding antique porcelain bowls, a mirror embellished with a carving of two dragons, and a wooden lotus-shaped lamp made from an old temple column.
In the living room as well, traditional architectural ornaments have been crafted into various accessories to complement the simple Ming-style chairs and tables. A carved flower-pattern strip of wood from a temple beam crowns another large mirror, and a set of four faded door panels have been modified into a tall storage cabinet.
The Lins, however, are not adverse to contemporary furnishings. In fact, they deliberately try to blend the old and the new. In their living room, a straight-backed Ming-style chair is placed in front of an electric keyboard, a contemporary Italian marble table holds a traditional curio cabinet, used for storing Walkmans and portable CD players, and an antique splay-legged cabinet is offset by a modish stuffed sofa and a flashy stereo system. Lorraine Lin (林玲) explains the family’s eclectic decorating approach: “If you just stuff the whole house with antiques, it’s not good. It’s kind of eerie. But if you add something totally different, it restores a sense of balance and brings out the unique features of the antiques.”
The Lins started collecting antiques in the mid-1980s, after being inspired by an outlandish fashion designer friend who used old Chinese furniture to display her clothing. At that time, their new interest was not a popular one in Taiwan. Foreigners were usually the only people interested in secondhand furniture. Many local people actually had a bias against hand-me-downs and saw old cabinets and beds as something to be discarded. Those who lived in the countryside—where until recently most of Taiwan’s antique furniture came from—were still chopping up their great-grandparents’ beds for firewood or for pigsty fences.
Today, the Lins are part of a major trend. Furnishings once destined for the farmyard woodpile now grace many an urban living room. Once a rarity, antique stores have opened all over the island. In Taipei, many of them are clustered along Chungshan North Road in suburban Shihlin and Tienmu. The Kuanghua Market in downtown Taipei also has about twenty shops, and on Sundays and holidays many more roadside antique stalls open up for the day. Helen Chang (張穎愷), manager of Unicorn Artwares Limited, one of Taiwan’s oldest antique stores, has seen her clientele change from nearly all foreigners to 60 percent Chinese over the past decade. “People can now accept these things,” she says.
The interest in down-home country furniture was first triggered at about the time the Lins started collecting, when a back-to-roots sentiment was sweeping the island. People were becoming eager to understand the history of their island and to preserve its culture as an important part of their heritage. Many artists and writers of this period were also expressing a soul-searching return to the past and a desire to create a sense of local identity.
At the same time, a generation of better-educated young professionals were starting to yearn for a stronger cultural dimension to their lives. They were willing to spend money on theater tickets and to visit the many new art galleries that were opening up. When it came to decorating their homes, they wanted something more than the cheap, mass-produced sofas and cabinets that had taken over the furniture market. The best alternative was to start collecting pieces from the past.
The craze for old furniture became so popular that the local supply from rural areas was nearly exhausted within a few years. But by this time, many people had been bitten by the collector’s bug. As Chang says, “It’s very addictive.” To meet the new demand, local stores began turning to Mainland China, at first buying scattered pieces through Hong Kong suppliers. When the ROC government lifted restrictions on visiting the mainland in the late 1980s, dealers could go directly to the source. They also benefited from the tax-exempt status of antique furniture imports under ROC law. And a boost in average family income—as well as many new fortunes being made through stock and real estate speculation—meant antique dealers could start charging higher prices. Many small-time entrepreneurs started getting in on what was becoming an increasingly lucrative market.
The Taiwan market is now flooded with old Chinese furniture. The amount of antiques imported from Mainland China and Hong Kong soared from 186 metric tons in 1991 to 845 metric tons in 1993, according to the Directorate General of Budget, Accounting and Statistics. Stores offer a wide variety of antique furniture types: besides the rustic country furniture that is spartan and somewhat wanting in design, collectors can find ornately carved and inlaid designs from the Ching dynasty (1644-1911), and the sleek, minimalist literati furniture of the Ming dynasty (1368-1644). In addition, many late seventeenth to nineteenth century pieces were also made in the Ming style.
But the surge in supply has also brought a surge in suspicious merchandise and disreputable—or simply ignorant—dealers. “You might think there are tons of antique furniture coming from Mainland China, but it is not necessarily all authentic,” says Kung Ching-ching (宮清卿), manager of the furniture section at The Gallery, one of the largest dealers in Taipei. “There is a trend right now on the mainland to collect old scraps and reconstruct them as antique furniture. Sometimes they use old materials, sometimes they use new. They will tell you it’s a real antique, but actually they smear dirt underneath to make it look antique to inexperienced collectors.”
John Ang (洪光明), co-owner of Artasia Fine Asian Antiques & Art Consultancy, has an even more succinct way of describing most of the old furniture imported from the mainland. He calls it “rubbish.” “People here don’t know what they are selling and what they are buying,” he says. All dealers, he points out, should do serious research on the furniture they buy in order to establish greater accountability for their business.
With a master’s degree in Chinese art history and extensive collecting experience, Ang is able to apply his own knowledge in appraising antiques. He and his staff have also compiled and cataloged pictures of furniture from historical paintings, woodblock prints, and ceramic designs. In addition, Artasia has a large collection of books on antique Chinese furniture as well as catalogs from Sotheby’ s auctions. These sources are all valuable as references for determining the authenticity of a piece of furniture. “We can check whether it is really Ming from the Ming woodblocks,” Ang says as an example. “So when we sell someone an item, we can show them it’s authentic because it compares to the woodblock print.”
But this kind of practice is the exception rather than the norm. The “antique furniture” sign inscribed on numerous shops is often misleading. Many of these are run by self-styled, overnight specialists who stockpile a mishmash of rare and commonplace pieces, which have often undergone dubious touchups or face-lifts. The pricing system is as helter-skelter as the merchandise. A similar cabinet priced at US$1,300 in a downtown store might sell for nearly twice that in an upscale suburban shop.
The antique stores along Chungshan North Road are known for being saturated with furniture assembled from new and old discards. The shop owners are often fully aware of the inauthenticity of their merchandise. “A lot of them know it and they sell them as fakes,” Ang says. “You take one apart, you clean off the lacquer and you find the wood is different, and the patina is different. You find that a whole part has been newly made, or sometimes you find that the entire thing is new.”
Most antique furniture does require some initial repair, as Kung of The Gallery explains. Old scraps are sometimes used to replace pieces that are missing or that have become cracked, rotted, or infested with insects. But a reputable dealer will never try to pawn off such furniture as entirely authentic. “We always inform our customers exactly which parts are repairs,” Kung says.
Kung tries to keep The Gallery accessible to all types of customers by offering the entire spectrum of antique furniture, from the reassembled old-and-new pieces, to high-quality imitations, to authentic antiques. In addition, she sells accessories made from old furniture and architectural parts.
Most of today’s collectors buy what dealers call commonplace or utilitarian antiques, as opposed to rare collector’s items. These are authentic pieces, but still affordable and practical for everyday use. “Most of our customers want something they can use,” Kung says. “Antique furniture takes up space in Taipei’s cramped apartments. If you are just collecting for the sake of collecting, how many pieces can you fit into your apartment? Therefore, the furniture has to be utilitarian.”
This type of furniture is imported in large quantities from Fujian and Guangdong provinces in southern China, and from the backwaters of provinces on or near the coast, like Jiangsu, Anhui, Zhejiang, and Jiangxi. It includes country cabinets as well as lower-priced Ming-style designs, which have become especially popular in recent years. Many collectors consider Ming furniture to be the culmination of Chinese furniture design as it has evolved since ancient times, and they also find it fits in well with their urban lifestyles. “I think modern people like sleek lines and simple designs,” says the Unicorn’s Helen Chang. “They have too much pressure in their daily lives, so they want to see simpler things.”
Some popular choices in the utilitarian category are small incense tables, low-lying kang tables, and the long, narrow tables that were used to hold lutes, all of which are useful additions placed next to a sofa or along a wall. Old-fashioned clothes racks, usually sparse frame-like constructions, are often sold as screens to segment off a dining and living room area. Bench-like daybeds, once used for napping, and the larger opium beds and kuei-fei or concubine beds become modern-day reclining chairs in larger living rooms. Small mirrored cabinets with rows of tiny drawers make good mini-dressers, and money boxes and camphor chests come in handy for storing jewelry or linens.
For many people, however, even such utilitarian pieces are impractical purchases. About half of Kung’s customers, especially older ones, actually prefer imitation antique furniture. They still have a traditional bias against anything secondhand and can see no reason to pay the high price for an authentic antique. “They like the old style, but they insist on having brand new furniture,” Kung says. She points to an old Taiwan-style kitchen cabinet priced at NT$40,000 (US$1,400). “Many Chinese customers would never buy this,” she says. “They can never accept that something with scratches could be priced at NT$40,000.”
The Gallery has its own factory for manufacturing furniture that looks antique but is more suitable for urban apartments and modern lifestyles. Their imitation tables, for example, are smaller than most antique tables. And some of their products—such as end tables, nightstands, and shoe racks—are simply not found in the lore of antique furniture. “Most of our customers don’t really care whether it’s old or new,” Kung says. “They just want furniture that can fit in with their daily lives.”
Practical accessories made from antique parts are also popular among many customers, although these have more decorative than collector’s value. A carved post or lintel from an old temple or a woodblock printing board, for example, can be fashioned into an attractive mirror frame. A round basin holder can be fitted with a glass top to act as a coffee table. A carved bed transom can be modified into a classy towel rack or simply framed and hung on the wall. Old window lattices can be transformed into a living room screen. Such accessories don’t come cheap. A detail from a door carving crafted into a lamp, for example, might sell for more than US$350. At The Gallery, an exquisite dining room table made by adding a glass top to an openwork bed ceiling with elaborate dragon and phoenix carvings, along with six Ming-style chairs, is priced at US$9,200.
At Unicorn Artwares, customers can dream up their own antique accessories by browsing through heaps of old furniture and curios and then turning their choices over to one of the store’s eight carpenters. The result is a custom-made “antique” creation, which might preserve the natural, age-worn look or be painted in bright new hues. One recent patron had a full-length, four-panel door that had been torn from an old Taiwanese house made into a living room screen for about US$2,700. Another chose a faded wash basin rack priced at US$300, had it treated, repaired, and repainted for another US$300, and took it home as an umbrella holder. “We not only ‘recycle’ furniture by reusing it,” says Unicorn manager Helen Chang, “but we also infuse old things with new life.”
Not everyone agrees with this approach. John Ang fears that making a habit of forging new things out of the old will be detrimental to the general state of antique preservation as well as to the art of modern furniture design. Once a piece of furniture is ruined by cleaning off the patina or cutting it up to make a window frame or table top, it cannot be recovered. While many of these pieces may not be worth preserving, that is not always the case. “If you are not aware, you may take a very rare piece and convert it into a coffee table,” Ang cautions. “And that might be just the piece that would have inspired a future furniture maker. Or there might be some piece that is really Ming but you don’t recognize it and you sand off the patina—it took four hundred years to build up that patina.”
But the kind of rare Chinese antique furniture that Ang prefers to stock is unaffordable to the average antique buff. Although he does keep a constant supply of lower-priced utilitarian pieces in order to keep his business going, his main collection at Artasia is top-of-the-line Ming-style furniture. One small incense table, made of a rare wood called huanghuali—one of twenty left in the world—is priced at about US$25,000. A pair of huanghuali cabinets carries a similar price tag. Exquisite and unique in design, these elegant pieces hail mainly from northern China. The market for such furniture is confined to a small circle of elite collectors.
Other Artasia pieces, while rare, are still within the grasp of well-to-do businesspeople and professionals. About 50 percent of Ang’s customers in the past year have been foreigners, and many of the rest are wealthy Chinese housewives in their mid-thirties to early forties. “I have more tai-tais [housewives] than anyone else,” he says. “They like to stand here for hours. Sometimes they have their bodyguards outside.”
Even at other antique stores, most customers are from the upper middle class. At the Unicorn, Helen Chang says, about 20 percent of the customers bring along their own interior designers. Antique collectors also tend to be in at least their thirties before they can afford to buy anything other than curios, although many older people still think antique furniture is not worth the investment. “They just say, ‘We have this stuff at our grandmother’s or our great-grandmother’s.’” Chang says. “Or, ‘I used to sleep on this when I was on the mainland,’ or ‘That looks like something from my mother’s dowry.’” But despite such traditional biases, the market for antique Chinese furniture has taken solid root in Taiwan, and a growing number of people are discovering the joys of collecting. “It can get you really excited,” Chang says. “And it’s fun.” - Peifeng Mary Tzen is a translator and editor based in Taipei.