The Tragedy of Sacred Asian Art
Decades of looting for sales to wealthy collectors have left much sacred art damaged or lost.
By Daniel Gauss
Asia Week New York 2024 will be held in March and many Asian antiquities will be on display for sale. After the high-profile raid by the Manhattan D.A.’s Office on sellers of Asian antiquities in 2016, a European law professor and specialist in antiquities theft referred to the sale of Asian art in Manhattan as “usually a depressing festival of pillage”. Since then, the attitude toward looted art has markedly changed and we frequently read about sacred art going back home from prominent museums. But the decades of looting have left much sacred art damaged or lost and the illegal antiquities trade may go further underground now.
In 2022 India found an Indian American antiquities dealer, Subhash Kapoor, guilty of the looting and trafficking of ancient Asian sacred art. He was sentenced to 10 years in prison. His organization had allegedly pillaged sacred art from India, Afghanistan, Nepal, Cambodia and Pakistan to sell to wealthy collectors through a New York City art gallery. The Manhattan District Attorney’s Office confiscated over 2,000 items from Kapoor and claimed they had nabbed one of the kingpins of the world-wide illegal Asian art trade; some experts are not so…
