History leaves behind many nameless individuals. What should we do when we recover a name, but that name leads to nothing more than an archival trace or a pictured body? From a name, how do we reconstruct an authentic historical subject, a voice, a style? This lecture introduces the Chinese painters of the global maritime trade, based in the port of Guangzhou (Canton), circa 1700-1850. These painters produced thousands of artworks for European and American buyers, but even today their historical identities remain purely speculative. Examining the art market, historical archives, and collecting enterprise which have named and unnamed them, Wong explores artistic identity, anonymity and the rise of signature authorship in its global modern form.

Winnie Wong is a historian of modern and contemporary art and visual culture, with a special interest in fakes, forgeries, frauds, copies, counterfeits, and other non-art challenges to authorship and originality. She is the author of Van Gogh on Demand: China and the Readymade and is associate professor of Rhetoric at the University of California, Berkeley.