18th-C. Korean Painted Silk Panel Screen
Mar 13, 2026
At the 2005 Bismarck event, Asian Arts appraiser Lark Mason met Dee, the owner of a tattered but magnificent silk court screen, several hundred years old and apparently of Chinese origin. Dee said she’d come close to throwing it out, but eventually enlisted Mason’s help to sell it at auction.
Toward the end of the day, a lady came in with a screen folded up that was not in very good
condition, opened it up, and my jaw dropped. I couldn't believe what I was seeing. It was
extraordinary. Dee, tell me about this. My husband had this when we were first going together.
It didn't fit in our home anymore, and so we stored it, and quite regretfully,
it got damaged, and I want to know if it's worth any value or if it's something to just
kind of discard and say, too bad it's gone. Now, Chinese painting is done in a narrative
fashion, so you have the same figure represented in different poses, and this is the figure of a
woman named Xi Wang Mu. She was sort of the leader of the immortals, which is this heavenly band of
deities in Chinese mythology, and they lived on an island called Po Shan, which is the island of
the immortals. We know that it has eight panels. First question I have is whether it's supposed
to have more than eight or not. If you look at the far side over there, you see there's a cloud
border. At the border that's behind us here, you'll see that there isn't. Anyone that could
have afforded this screen lived in a tremendously large compound. This was something that was meant
for the very highest tiers of Chinese society. I think that the value of this has to be in the
$30,000 to $50,000 range, as it is now. Oh my goodness, and I was wondering whether I should.
What were you wondering you're going to do? I didn't know whether it should be saved or not.
Oh my goodness, thank you. We ended up speaking with the, she said, I'd like to sell this.
I said, I've got to get rid of this screen. It's just sitting there, and my daughter said, well,
that's not hard, and she got on her computer, and she emailed them, and a half hour later,
Blart called. We prepared it for auction, promoted it to all of our Chinese clients,
and had it advertised everywhere, and everybody is going, what a terrific Chinese screen,
and then the auction day comes. The day of the auction, I was on the way to a doctor's appointment,
and my daughter text $60,000, and I thought, wow, and I'm at this appointment, and my phone's
keeping going, bing, bing, bing, and I said, my kids must be trying to figure out how they can
get that money away from me, and split it, and after I was done, I got a hold of my daughter,
and she says, come on, it's still going on. People that are participating are Chinese,
and they start bidding enthusiastically, and then they drop out, and they're supplanted by
all these bidders from Korea. When it got higher, my son had text, he was in California,
and he had text, mom gave Lark a hug at $30,000 to $50,000, what's she going to do now?
And it was just a joke, it was just a joke.
It passed $100,000, and then it was in a race car to $200,000, and then $300,000 came and went,
and then we're over $400,000, and we're going, oh my gosh, it kept going, and ended up over $540,000,
and we were really puzzled. Why were the Korean bidders so interested in this partial screen?
Something's, we're missing something. It was the realization that it was actually not incomplete.
It was just not a Chinese screen. It was a Korean screen, and it was a Korean screen that was
purposely created to copy a Chinese screen. This is an important, important object.
It really shocked me, it shocked the audience of Chinese bidders who were bidding,
it shocked my staff, it shocked all of us. We're surprised.
I just, to this day, I can't really comprehend that much money for a screen.
Particularly a moldy screen. A moldy one that I was going to burn.