In the low light before daybreak, the robbers raced to the southwest wing and shattered a window. “If we say an item is in China, they say, ‘Prove it,’ ” said Kenneth Didriksen, the head of Norway's art-crime unit. With more than 1,500 rooms, the palace is a maze of opulence. “I read about the thefts in the newspaper,” he told me. Is it a conspiracy? (Not long after the heads were returned, Christie's became the first international fine-art auction house to receive a license to operate independently in China.). From award-winning writing and photography to binge-ready videos to electric live events, GQ meets millions of modern men where they live, creating the moments that create conversations. Strange how it keeps happening, how the greatest works of Chinese art keep getting brazenly stolen from museums around the world. What does restoration/redemption look like in this instance? The intruders rappelled through a glass ceiling and grabbed dozens of pieces: imperial seals, elegant vases, and more. One of the country’s most powerful corporate conglomerates, the state-run China Poly Group, launched a shadowy programme aimed at locating and recovering lost art. In 2013, for instance, two of the famed zodiac heads, the rabbit and the rat, from the estate of the French designer Yves Saint Laurent, were handed over after a planned auction was scuttled. Jiang was reclining in a black leather chair and smoking an e-cigarette. Others have quietly shipped crates of art back to China, in hopes of avoiding trouble with either the thieves or the government. Vengeance for treasures plundered years ago? The heist took less than six minutes. They called a Chinese lawyer and gave me the phone so she could tell me that the museum had no items from the Old Summer Palace and that all their items were held via legal means.” (A spokesman for the Met denied that any such call took place.
It's since added a fourth, while a fifth and sixth are housed at China's National Museum and a seventh is kept at the Capital Museum. Is it a conspiracy? Once the police had dispatched units to respond, two robbers entered offices adjoining the KODE and smashed through a glass wall into the museum's China exhibit. FOR MUCH OF THE 20TH century, China’s leaders hardly seemed to care about the country’s lost and plundered antiquities. In it, the site looks like a bombed-out war zone, with barren patches where statues and monuments once stood. Suddenly a new cadre of plutocrats—members of the country's growing club of billionaires—began purchasing artifacts at a dizzying pace. “Their return is the deepest hope of the Chinese people,” she said.
Were the Chinese coming to assess collections, to conduct research, or to reclaim objects on the spot? After a visit to the Wallace Collection, in central London, he says, he noticed the museum's website no longer listed the objects he'd asked about. A guard stood watch nearby. The biggest prize of all, and the most elusive, is the set of zodiac heads from the fountain at the Old Summer Palace, five of which remain missing. Long Reads. I asked if she thought the rest would ever be returned. He's brawny and compact, with a windburned face and messy gray hair. Created by the last empress of France, the wife of Napoleon III, the gallery was stocked with works so rare that their value was considered incalculable.
Art was a symbol of bourgeois decadence, fit for destruction rather than preservation. We need [the Chinese] people to see that everything that belonged to us is coming back.”, Liu says curators in the UK were less defensive. Huang Nubo has a similarly patriotic interest in China's art. Soon thereafter the museum shipped seven of the marble columns back to China to be displayed at Peking University on permanent loan. When the heads come back, we will finally feel the power of our country.”. A month later, in Bergen, Norway, intruders descended from a glass ceiling and plucked 56 objects from the China Collection at the KODE Museum. Behind these purchases is almost always a well-connected Chinese billionaire eager to demonstrate China's modern resurgence on the world stage.
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