The Knoedler Forger Defends Himself

BusinessWeek tracked down Pei-Shan Qian in China to hear his side of the story on Glafira Rosales’s fake works. He maintains he had no knowledge that the works would be passed off as fakes:

“The FBI said they were done by the hands of a genius,” he said on a recent morning in Shanghai. “Well, that’s me. How strange it feels!”

In his first interview for the Western media, Qian, 73, insisted on his innocence, outlining in his soft Shanghai accent a classic immigrant’s tale that took an odd twist. He made artworks that resembled those of Jackson Pollock, Mark Rothko, and others, yes, but he never intended to pass them off as those artists’ work for profit. Sitting in a gallery of his own works, Qian said: “I made a knife to cut fruit. But if others use it to kill, blaming me is unfair.” […]

The scandal in New York is “a very big misunderstanding,” Qian said, incredulous that anyone would have considered his imitations to be the genuine work of masters. “Nobody would take them seriously,” he said. “It’s impossible to imitate them—from the papers to the paints to the composition. It’s impossible to do it exactly.” […]

As for Qian, friends support his argument that he was also duped. “He had no idea the business side of the art world is not that clean,” said Shanghai-based artist Ann Yen, who has known Qian since 1982. “He just keeps painting. Doesn’t matter if the earth is shattered or sky darkened. He cannot live without painting.”

Leaving the gallery in Shanghai, Qian said he has lost sleep over the forgery case. He’s getting famous in the wrong way, he said. “I have suffered for what I love.”

The Other Side of an $80 Million Art Fraud: A Master Forger Speaks  (BusinessWeek)