As a treasure in Tibetan culture and art, thangka is known as the "encyclopedia of Tibet" with historical materials, doctrinal interpretation and practical functions. The production process of thangka is very complicated, usually a beautiful thangka, it takes the painter several months or even years, so the market price continues to rise, from 2000 to now has increased by nearly 10 times, the most common contemporary thangka (about 100cm×60cm, ordinary pigments) also need about 1000 yuan. Vo thangka believes that as a new favorite in the collecting world, Thangka treasures have great appreciation potential, and some famous treasures have a strong appreciation space.
8 years price increased 10 times Thangka collection heated up
With thangka being included in the first batch of national intangible cultural heritage list, thangka is receiving more and more collectors' attention, and thangka painting, a traditional Tibetan skill, has been developed as never before.
Thangka, also known as Tangga or Tangka, is a Tibetan transliteration, is a unique form of painting art in Tibetan culture, similar to scroll painting in Han areas, which arose during the Songtsen Gampo period and has always been regarded as a treasure by the Tibetan people. Thangka comes in a variety of varieties and textures, but most are drawn on canvas and paper. There are also fabric thangkas such as embroidery, brocade, silk and appliqués, which have had a far-reaching influence for more than a thousand years.
Thangka's drawings are extremely complex, with elaborate materials, brilliant colors, enduring, and a strong snowy style. Thangka's subject matter is all-encompassing, including religious paintings, biographical paintings, historical paintings, custom paintings reflecting living customs, astronomical almanacs, Tibetan medicines, and human anatomy. They have the characteristics of general history, interest, knowledge, religion, craftsmanship, etc., and are known as the "encyclopedia" of the Tibetan people. In 2006, thangka was included in the first batch of national intangible cultural heritage protection lists.
According to The Knowledge of Vo thangka, in recent auctions, Ming and Qing Thangka have repeatedly made sky-high prices in the auction market. According to industry insiders, since 2000, the price of thangka has increased by nearly 10 times. At present, in the collection market, many contemporary thangka masters' works are often tens of thousands of yuan, hundreds of thousands of yuan or even hundreds of thousands of yuan, and some large-sized fine thangkas are of great value, and their market potential has gradually begun to be recognized by people.
The drawing process of thangka is based on the size of the picture, the white cloth is tied with a rope on a special wooden frame, and the cloth surface is smoothed by a special method. Thangkas are generally drawn with burned willow charcoal strips, and when they are finished, they are finalized with light ink lines, and then they are colored, dyed, colored, and finally gold.
Most of the thangka's pigments are taken from nature and are all processed by the painters themselves: they are made by mixing ores, plants, medicinal herbs, animals and pure gold powder. Thangkas distinguish between black thangkas with gold on a black background, red thangkas with gold in cinnabar, and gold thangkas with red on a gold background.
Ming and Qing treasures are difficult to find There is no shortage of fine products in modern and contemporary times
Due to the lack of sufficient depth in the understanding of thangkas, many people will inevitably have some misunderstandings in the process of collecting, especially the judgment of the value of thangka collections, which is often based on the age of early and early. In fact, this criterion is quite one-sided.
At present, in China, the Thangka boutiques of the Ming Dynasty are also very rare. At an auction in Carlsdale, New York in 1994, a giant "embroidered Red Night Devil Thangka" made by Ming Yongle was sold for $1 million. In 2002, the Thangka was unveiled at the Hong Kong Carstead Auction and finally sold for HK$30.67 million, more than tripled in eight years, and set a record for the highest thangka transaction price. It can be seen that the value of thangka cultural relics before the Ming Dynasty is quite high, so it also has a high collection value.
Next, please enjoy a group of Senju Kannon thangkas numbered 138-216409:
However, most of the extant thangkas are Qing Dynasty works, and the quality is uneven, and not all of them have high collection value. Judging from the information coming out of auctions in recent years, the price of the general Qing Dynasty thangka is also thousands of yuan, and tens of thousands of yuan is already considered good. There are three types of thangkas worth collecting:
The first is the thangka made or collected by the Qing Palace. The Court of the Qing Dynasty produced a large number of Thangkas, mainly painted by the Buddha Lamas in the Zhongzheng Hall, and at the same time involved the Han chinese and Western painters of the court, which made the court Thangka style diverse and had a Chinese-Tibetan artistic style. In 2005, at the Chengming auction, a painting of "Qing Imperial Embroidery Shakyamuni and his second disciple Thangka" was sold for 825,000 yuan.
The second is a thangka with a unique theme. Thangkas show a lot of subject matter, but there are also some relatively rare and very unique content and meanings. At the autumn cultural relics auction held by tianjin cultural relics company in 2002, three Qing Dynasty Tibetan medicine thangkas were sold at a high price of 33,000 yuan, much higher than the transaction prices of other thangka lots of the same era.
The third is embroidery and silk thangka. In addition to painting thangkas, the Qing dynasty court also custom embroidered and silk thangkas in Suzhou. Embroidery and silk thangka are not only precious materials, but also extremely difficult to make and difficult to preserve, so such works handed down in the Qing Dynasty are very rare and extremely rare in court thangkas.
The number of modern and contemporary thangkas is the largest. In the Tibetan tourism market, you can often see a large number of various thangkas, and some collectors believe that the collection value of thangkas in this period is not large, but it is not. Thangka art has a continuous and good heritage in Tibet, and generations of Thangka craftsmen have inherited and developed this unique art, and many crafts have reached a new height, so fine products emerge endlessly.
Old and new thangkas are the hardest to judge
Although thangka fever has promoted the development of thangka art to a certain extent, driven by economic interests, in recent years, the thangka market has been filled with new and old, paint fraud, shoddy and other phenomena are also more common. Due to the high value of thangkas in the Ming and Qing dynasties, many people use smoking, smoking and smearing on newly painted thangkas to make old ones for huge profits. Other artists use modern advertising pigments instead of mineral pigments to shoddy.
Experts said that there are two major difficulties in collecting thangkas: one is to judge the true and false, and the other is to judge the new and old.
The identification of true and false thangkas is mainly judged from the aspects of subject matter, content, production process, materials, and painting. Most thangkas are hung in temples or homes, and are perennially stained with incense to form a natural old color, and the dust on the surface can be seen by using a dry wool row pen or a dry cotton ball to wipe the dust on the surface to see that the color is calm and natural, and the color is uniform. The old thangka also takes smoked and smoked soil to apply the old, but the feel is rough and dry, the old color is not natural, and the color is uneven.
The second is the penetration of the pigment. Old thangkas can "eat" pigments into them, while old thangkas can obviously see that the pigments are still only "floating on the surface"; the friction, creases, peeling, and corrosion of old thangkas are very natural and harmonious, while the old thangkas treated with acids and alkalis and other chemicals are obviously stiff; the corners of old thangkas may generally have damage, insect bites, and may also have tiny eggs.
As for the painters, the thangka style before the 19th century is simple and simple, and because the pigments are pure natural minerals, the colors are strong, thick, stiff, and the colors are not too rich, mostly red, blue, black, gold, silver (that is, white), and the face color of the characters is black (plateau color); and after the 19th century, it is influenced by Han style rendering, setting, and outlining, and mostly uses techniques such as blending and shading and 24 times of chiaroscuro rendering. Contemporary plants are also used to extract pigments, which are soft and peaceful.
In addition, the value of thangka painted with natural pigments is higher than that of general pigments, which refer to turquoise, coral, agate, gold and silver, etc., and general pigments refer to watercolor pigments. Thangkas from temples and aristocratic families are of relatively high value, and the identification method is to see whether the craftsmanship is meticulous or not and whether the pigment is a natural pigment. The sleeve of the thangka scroll from the nobility is sterling silver, and the thangka is edged with silk brocade. To determine if it is from a temple, you can check the temple seal. The number and degree of detail of the characters also determine the degree of painting engineering, and the focus should be on the face shape, eyebrows, and magic tools of the characters. The cloth used in thangka, the gemstones, gold wires, etc. used on it, also affect its value. Because most collectors cannot judge whether the thangka is a masterpiece or a painting by a high monk, they can only judge its value through the painter.
Vo thangka believes that the value of thangka collection depends on whether the storage time is long, mineral raw materials and watercolor pigments, the preservation time is longer, and the color state is more stable. The gouache-drawn thangka, on the other hand, has a very short shelf life, only a few short years. In addition, the colors drawn by thangkas should be mild. In general, a good thangka color is a variation in a basic hue. If the picture is too gorgeous, it may be that the modern paint is painted and is not suitable for collection.