Yiwei Zheng, an excellent example of why not to deal illegally in ivory and endangered species!

This article outlines a Nationalized U.S Citizen, Yiwei Zheng,

(Image property of the Minneapolis StarTribune)

who has been arrested for being a trafficker in illegal ivory and rhino horn, minimally! If this all holds up to be true, which it appears it most likely is, this “Professor” deserves to go down for the rest of his life! He thought he was smarter than everyone else and therefore the rules did not apply to him. He wanted to play dishonest games that endangered our world heritage, and now he needs to be willing to accept the consequences of those actions equally to the greedy payoff he was seeking. If this is all true, clearly he was not smarter than everyone else, and he got caught red handed! If true, he is exactly the kind of person who is driving the extinction of the elephants and rhinos! I am shocked that St. Cloud State University is allowing him to continue teaching, shame on them! That is a poor decision when the charges are so sever and his behavior so blatant and arrogant! Is that really what St. Cloud State University wants to project to the world, that they support criminal traffickers in endangered species? I hope not, as a Minnesota Native. If, from the start, he would have just worked with United States Fish and Wildlife Services (USFWS), I am fairly certain he could have done very well for himself, his family and the world, he instead figured he was above the law and greedy! Let the cards fall where they may. Individual fines for selling ivory illegally can be in the hundreds-of-thousands of US dollars! And, enforcement of the existing laws have been increased significantly since 2014.

We have a direct relationship with the USFWS so that we can give our clients the most accurate advice on their ivory, rhino, and other endangered species art, antiques and artifacts! This is what we do, and we do it right from the beginning! If you need help with your unknown pieces, then please feel free to get in touch.

Enjoy the read:

http://www.startribune.com/local/298172091.html

Greg C. Brown, M.S., ISA AM.

info@asianappraisals.com

1-888-815-9430

Europeans and Native Americans shown to be ~25% related, I’m not surprised!

A great new finding has come to light showing just how related we all really are around this little globe we sail through space on together – not a surprise to me! This is a really great revelation in science and the human race at many levels, and has a direct impact on the research that I have been doing on the relationship between the Mongol-Siberian and Native American Shamans.

I have said for a very long time that, 1) the migration from Asia to the Americas happened significantly earlier than is currently accepted, and 2) there were a much larger number of migrations and migration routes (and thus mixing of peoples) than are also currently accepted. I have always believed that migrations occurred all up and down the Asian continent and down into the South Pacific, crossing over to the Americas. However, it was not until Dr. Denis Stanford’s fantastic work with the Solutrean Peoples of Europe and their stone point relationship to Eastern Native Americans did I believe that ancient migrations may have come from Europe to the Americans until about the time of the Vikings. However, it made perfect sense to me when I first learned about Stanford’s work from my Uncle, who went to Grad School and did field work with him.

However, even though this recent revelation of the genomic relationship between Europeans and Native Americans is not surprising to me, it has not been directly related to Stanford’s work yet, but I think it lends even more credence to it as being that much more possible, as it does similarly so to my own work. Enjoy the read, it is fascinating but commonsensical. “Why are we fussing and a fighting” when we all know we are all the same people? Here is more proof of that.

The amazing article from the New York Times: 24,000-Year-Old Body Shows Kinship to Europeans and American Indians

The image below come from http://www.wellspringcolumbus.org/Default.aspx?tabid=71

What ironic timing to the last article! The elephants are next to go extinct!

http://www.king5.com/news/editors-pick/6-tons-of-seized-ivory-being-crushed-in-Denver-231828871.html

They killed at least 32,000 African elephants last year, with only about 500,000 knows to exist in the wild any more. At that rate, they all may be dead in under 16 years, that means there may be no wild elephants by 2029!

We really need to put our trillions of war dollars into making the lives of people in Africa and other poaching countries acceptable, this would be easy, just with a quarter of the US military budget! And, we would still have the strongest military in the world and would still be spending more on it that the rest of the world combined! It can be done, but greed continues to kill people, animals, morals and entire societies!

This is part of the Asian arts and antiques industry and we have a responsibility in it too, including prevention!

The image below is from the King 5 News article.

Shame on all humans! Western Black Rhino has been declared extinct!

Shame on all humans! Western Black Rhino has been declared extinct!

Oh man! Please read the story in the link above! It is really, really terrible. My heart has sunk when I read it! What a loss to the entire history of life on earth, as there was absolutely no natural reasons for this to happen at this time other than ignorance, stupidity, selfishness and insatiable greed! So, fools, where are you going to earn your money now? I am very sorry for the human race’s inexcusable actions against all of my Black Rhino relatives… The main driving force behind this atrocity is the Chinese medicine industry’s ignorance and lack of desire to simply educate people and find a real solution to offer! In the US, we call this a snake oil sale man, and Doctors who do this are called quacks! Shame on any one saying they are a Healing Doctor who prescribed this, or anyone who preached this path to “health”! Also, the greatest of shame on all Governments  including my own and especially China (who would have had the greatest impact on stopping this from happening – if they could end foot binding, they could just as easily change the people’s perceptions of the use of Rhino horn as medicine!), who do not enforce international laws and CITIES on such critical issues! So, so sad!

The image from this article, below, is sadly of a now dead animal that was only recently one of the last living Black Rhinos on earth! We need to start to care and pay attention people, we have become blind to Mother Nature and her vital importance to our long-term survival!  We killed  off the Steller’s Sea Cow by 1768, only 27 years from first contact in 1741! The Elephants ARE next! Do we really want to kill off the largest living land animals? 

What every Asian art and antiques collector should know BEFORE buying!

What every Asian art and antiques collector should know BEFORE buying!

Hello everyone, I have been on hiatus for a while for an expedition/research trip, travel and personal reasons, you know life IS busy!  But I am back and will start to post again until the next major interruption takes my attention elsewhere.

Today I want to just let you read this article on the truth of the Asian art and antiques business and market. If you have ever bought, are thinking of buying again, or want to start buying, if you are experienced, a novice, and especially if you think you know it all, I urge you to tough out this long article and read it from start to finish. It will be well worth your time for the education you will get on the truth of this industry, especially in China. It is also a good way for me to promote my consulting services to be frank, because I can save you tens and hundreds of thousands of dollars if you just spend a bit with me consulting before you buy! I have done it before and will do it again! I could have saved one lawyer well over $300,000.00 if he would have just set his ego aside and called me before he bought! However, instead, he called me to appraise the pieces he had already bought and I had to tell him ALL of his monumental “ivory” pieces were not only fakes, but either bone (1) or resin (3)! I am here to help stop the you from getting cheated, but you must ask for the help, or I will only be around to break your hearts later, telling you that you got ripped off! If you are willing to spend thousands, let alone millions, wouldn’t it be a wise investment to hire me for a small percentage of that price to make sure? Buy the way, just in case you were wondering, this does not just happen in China, but every country in the world to one degree or another! Caveat Emptor is the key phrase in the art and antiques industry at every level from sellers, dealers, appraisers and experts!

Have a nice read: http://www.nytimes.com/projects/2013/china-art-fraud/

Sincerely, Greg C. Brown, M.S., ISA, CAGA.

President, Greg C. Brown & Associates, Inc.

Minnesota Sub-Chapter Chairman, The Explorers Club.

1-888-815-9430

Info@asianappraisals.com

“Integrity has no need of rules.”
:Albert Camus

 

My real focus is the crocodile skulls, but what an interesting woman.

The link below for this article is focused on a very early (rare) woman who was a self-taught Paleontologist about 200 years ago. She had all of the advantages anyone would ever want in life, let alone buying a large estate that was near to the very fossiliferous cliffs that would capture her curiosity and made her famous in her day – that always helps a lot! However, at the same time, she was brave and self-confident enough in a time when this was not only rare but often frowned upon. We can all learn something from her bravery and willingness to live life to it’s fullest. She was clearly very passionate and skilled.

My real point of this posting though, has to do with the HUGE fossil skull in the image. This beast was about 10 meters long, and could have easily eaten a human whole in one bit! The largest crocs today are about 5-6 meters, or about 1/2 of the size of this fossil crocodile specimen!  An average modern croc skull is what you see inside of the jaw of this giant. It was HUGE! Enjoy the read. The Image below comes directly from the article, which is found at: http://www.telegraph.co.uk/science/dinosaurs/7829705/Barbara-Hastings-the-first-lady-of-fossils.html.

Sincerely, Greg C. Brown, MS, ISA.

Amazing donation to the Minneapolis Institute of Arts!

Here is an article by Mary Abbe from the Minneapolis Star Tribune news paper about an extremely generous donation given by Libby and Bill Clark. They have donated their $25+ Million dollar Japanese art collection to the Minneapolis Instuitute of Arts! WOW! http://www.startribune.com/entertainment/stageandarts/210139451.html

Here is a link to The Clark Center for Japanese Art & Culture as well, http://www.ccjac.org/aboutus/interview.html

Enjoy, Greg C. Brown, MS, ISA.

Susan Fox, An interesting artist who is near and dear to my heart with her work

I have just had the pleasure of finding out about and meeting an interesting American artist from Oregon, Susan Fox, who is a fellow member of the Explorers Club with me. She creates wildlife art, but more interesting she loves oil painting wildlife art in Mongolia, one of my favorite places on earth, as well as other wondrous places as Kenya, the Sea of Cortez and North America! Susan captures a part of this with her use of natural soft lighting and gentle colors. Enjoy checking out her work. The images below come directly from Susan’s web site, found at: http://foxstudio.biz.

Enjoy, Greg C. Brown, MS, ISA, CAGA, MN ’09.

This is EXACTLY why elephant poaching continues!

There could not be a more corrupt or disgusting answer than this by the Kenyan government, who sits in the middle of the elephant poaching/enforcement crisis and is a signator to CITES! The only words I can think are pretty bad, so I will hold my tongue, as this is a public forum! I have always wanted to travel to Kenya, one of the cradles of human evolution, I even have a special 25th anniversary flag from their country, but will not until this changes profoundly. For their $350 fine, they will loose thousands, and more likely tens-of-tousands of my dollars in business in the future by me not traveling there now, let alone other disgusted travelers that hear about this. Click the link below to read the article.

http://allafrica.com/stories/201303280098.html.

Excellent short video discussion of how to handle and look at Chinese paintings!

This is a really great discussion about, and of how to handle, view and enjoy traditional Chinese paintings by one of the worlds great Chinese painting scholars, Dr. Maxwell Hearn, the Douglas Dillon Curator of Asian art at no less than the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York City. Within this discussion you will hear the interesting treatment of perspective that is common in traditional Chinese painting and many similar Asian traditions of painting. People like retired U. C. Berkeley professor, Dr. James Cahill, discussed similar things about perspective in his work. While at one of the Asian Arts Curatorial Council meeting, to which I was a member from 2001 – 2010, my friend the retired Curator of Asian Art of the Minneapolis Institute of Arts, Dr. Robert Jacobsen, talked about the unusual nature of perspective as portrayed in Chinese painting as well. Perspective in these paintings can be very different from that generally employed by Western artists, so it some times looks and can even feel strange to westerners. However, this is part of what makes their style of painting so curious and interesting. Enjoy the video, which I originally found at the New York Times website, but I have found again here posted on YouTube, http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WPmED0GbYUs.

The image above comes from the website Little Red Book, a Million Conversations, found at: http://www.littleredbook.cn/2009/04/13/construction-cranes-in-the-bamboo-forest-balancing-nature-and-urbanization-in-china-psa-advertising/. This site has an interesting discussion of Chinese paintings also worth reading. Enjoy.

Sincerely, Greg C. Brown, MS, ISA.