For both museums and collectors, questions of "authenticity" often dominate the decision to acquire a new work. This issue is especially thorny for Westerners when dealing with Chinese art.

Believing that everything has a precedent, Chinese artists were never bashful about reproducing art, typically seeing less of a difference between the original work and reproductions. As a result, replication has often been considered a fundamental mode of production in Chinese art, with roots extending to antiquity. In turn, some collectors would knowingly brandish originals next to replicas while others completely rejected the idea of imitations as artworks.

The essays in Original Intentions explore the highly controversial questions of faking, copying, and replicating Chinese painting, bronzes, ceramics, works on paper, and sculpture. Offering a broad range of perspectives on conservation, technical analysis, social history, and collecting, the contributors to the volume explore the question of authenticity in the arts of China. Essays feature both theoretical and object-based research in a broad chronological framework, addressing a wide range of issues in both Chinese and Western contexts.