Liu Qingwu doesn’t set out to commit a crime. He only wants to sell a
painting—something more substantial than the Impressionist knockoffs he flogs to
tourists in front of New York’s Metropolitan Museum of Art. But the lucrative
commission he receives from a Chelsea art dealer is more complicated than he
initially realizes. Liu has been hired to create not an homage to Andrew
Cantrell’s modernist masterpiece, Elegy, but a forgery that will sell for millions.
The painting will change the lives of everyone associated with it—Liu, a Chinese
immigrant still reeling from his wife’s recent departure; Caroline, a gallery
owner intent on saving her aunt’s legacy; Molly, her perceptive assistant; and
Harold, a Taiwanese businessman with an ethical dilemma on his hands. Weaving
together their stories with that of Cantrell and the inspiration for his
masterpiece, Wendy Lee’s intricate, multilayered novel explores the unique
fascination of great art and the lengths to which some are driven to create
it—and to possess it. Lee e-chats with Writing a Woman’s Life columnist
Yona Zeldis McDonough and reveals the ways in which her writing expresses
the things she holds dearest.
Wendy Lee is the author of the novels Across a Green Ocean and
Happy Family, which was named one of the top ten debuts of 2008 by
Booklist and received an honorable mention from the Association of Asian
American Studies. A graduate of New York University’s Creative Writing Program,
she has worked as a book editor and an English teacher in China. She lives in
Queens, New York.
YZM: What drew you to this story?
WL: In 2012 I read an article about an art forgery case in which
paintings attributed to modern masters such as Mark Rothko and Jackson Pollock
were discovered to be fakes…and the forger turned out to be a Chinese immigrant
who worked out of his garage in Queens! It seemed like a colossal joke on the
art world. I read more, and most of the stories were about the gallery that sold
the forgeries, the woman who ran it, and her art dealer. Less was written about
the forger, and I was curious to know why someone like him would commit this
crime, as well what motivated everyone involved in it. This definitely was truth
being stranger than fiction.
YZM: Did you find many parallels between the lives of artists and
those of writers?
WL: I think all creative people have to deal with similar struggles, from
the difficulty of translating what’s in your head to the outside world, to the
practicality of making a living. Then there are those artists and writers who
are larger than life, to the point where their personalities overtake their
work, when you’re wondering whether that work has any intrinsic value.
YZM: How was it working from multiple points of view?
WL: While the point of view of the forger, the Chinese immigrant, was the
one that interested me the most, I wanted to explore the story from many
different angles. My intention was for the five characters—the forger, the
galley owner, her assistant, the buyer, and the original artist—to share traits
with each other. For example, the assistant is an aspiring artist who might have
been the forger starting out as a young painter. The forger and the buyer, who
is from Taiwan, both have issues with their national identity. While not all of
these characters interact, I wanted them to have more that connected than
separated them.
YZM: How do you come up with your ideas?
WL: Almost everything I write about has something to do with the idea of
family or belonging. My first novel, Happy Family, was inspired by the
transnational adoption of girls from China, as viewed from the perspective of a
recent Chinese immigrant who becomes the nanny to one. My second, Across a
Green Ocean, which is more autobiographical, involves the story of my
great-uncle, who was sent to western China during the intellectual purges of the
1950s. I’m really interested in what is lost due to immigration and the gap
between generations.
YZM: Can you talk about your journey as a writer?
WL: My mother is a writer in Chinese, so I grew up with her encouraging
me to tell stories. I always wanted to be a “writer,” but while I took writing
classes in college, I felt I didn’t have anything interesting to write about.
After I graduated, I taught English in China for a couple of years before
getting an MFA. Even after three novels, I don’t think of myself as a “writer”
so much as someone who enjoys futzing with words, who sometimes gets paid for it
and more often does not, and probably spends more time not writing or thinking
about writing than actually writing.
YZM: What’s next on your horizon?
WL: I have a toddler and am still figuring out the whole
parenting-while-writing thing. Supposedly you start writing again when they go
to kindergarten?
“I suppose I did it because I wanted something to show for the thirty
years—longer than I had lived in my homeland—that I had been here in America.
Something that was properly appreciated, even if someone else got all the
credit.”
Liu Qingwu doesn’t set out to commit a crime. He only wants to sell a
painting—something more substantial than the Impressionist knockoffs he flogs to
tourists outside New York’s Metropolitan Museum of Art. But the lucrative
commission he receives from a Chelsea art dealer is more complicated than he
initially realizes. Liu has been hired to create not an homage to Andrew
Cantrell’s modernist masterpiece, Elegy, but a forgery that will sell for
millions.
The painting will change the lives of everyone associated with it—Liu, a Chinese
immigrant still reeling from his wife’s recent departure; Caroline, a gallery
owner intent on saving her aunt’s legacy; Molly, her perceptive assistant; and
Harold, a Taiwanese businessman with an ethical dilemma on his hands. Weaving
together their stories with that of Cantrell and the inspiration for his
masterpiece, Wendy Lee’s intricate, multilayered novel explores the unique
fascination of great art and the lengths to which some are driven to create
it—and to possess it.
Women's Fiction
[Kensington, On Sale: November 29, 2016, Trade Size
/ e-Book, ISBN: 9781617734892 / eISBN: 9781617734908]
About Yona Zeldis McDonough
Yona Zeldis McDonough is the author of six novels; her
seventh, THE HOUSE ON
PRIMROSE POND, will be out from New American Library in February, 2016. In
addition, she is the editor of the essay collections The Barbie
Chronicles: A Living Doll Turns Forty and All the Available Light: A
Marilyn Monroe Reader. Her short fiction, articles and essays have been
published in anthologies as well as in numerous national magazines and
newspapers. She is also the award-winning author of twenty-six books for
children, including the highly acclaimed chapter books, The Doll Shop
Downstairs and The Cats in the Doll Shop. Yona lives in Brooklyn, New
York with her husband, two children and two noisy Pomeranians.
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