Page 28 - C.T. Loo A paper about his impact and activities in the Chinese art Market

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collection, despite the Chinese government’s restrictions on the exportation of

3
antiquities.
In 1908, Loo established other antique business under the name “Laiyuan and

Company” in Paris with branches in Beijing and Shanghai. Loo’s business benefited not

only from China’s accelerating pace in its entry into the global economy at the turn of the

4
twentieth century, but also from his contact with leading dealers, collectors, museums,
5
and scholars in France. Loo was aware of the incipient interest in early Chinese art in the

West. He observed that the taste for later works dominated the early twentieth-century

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Euro-American market, “Up to this time, with the art center in Paris, we were dealing

only in Ch’ing porcelains, particularly three color on biscuit and at this time the famous

Morgan, Altman and Salting Collections were made.” (Loo 1940, Preface) (Fig.2). Loo

mentioned that in the mid-1910s he sold an ancient jade plaque to the French collector G.

Gieseler for 320 francs (U.S. $ 64), and “ …at the same time, three-color porcelain

objects---such as black hawthorns, were selling for from 23 to 50 thousand dollars” (Loo

1950, Preface). It is in the field of early Chinese art that Loo detected a new market. In

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In 1913 and 1914, the Chinese government passed two acts to impose restrictions on the
exportation of antiquities (Tao 2003, 53).
4 At the turn of the twentieth century, Shanghai emerged as the largest commercial center
of China. Foreign trade flourished there.
5 Loo’s associates include the dealer Marcel Bing, the collector Dr. G. Gieseler of the
Northern Railways Company of France, the director Musee Cernuschi, d’Ardenne de
Tizac, and Sinologists, such as Victor Segalen, Jean Lartigue, Edouard Chavannes, and
Paul Pelliot.
6 Around 1909-1910.