Fakes and Forgeries Flood South Asia's Booming Art Market
As many as one in ten works of modern art sold privately in India could be forgeries, according to the Financial Times, which describes fakes as the biggest problem now facing the South Asian art market. The finding, reported on 19 August 2026, comes as prices for modern and contemporary South Asian work climb and private sales — transactions arranged outside the public auction room, where cataloguing and due diligence are thinner — expand to meet demand.
ARTnews reported the same day that the broader boom across the South Asian art market has brought a parallel surge in fakes and forgeries, with works attributed to major modern names turning up on the secondary market at a pace that specialists say is increasingly difficult to police. ARTnews
The problem is not confined to South Asia. Anthony Lin, a former chairman of Christie's in Asia, warned as far back as 2008 that large numbers of fakes were finding their way into auctions everywhere, speaking to Reuters about the shadow cast over the Chinese ceramics trade at the time. His caution predates the current South Asian spike by nearly two decades, but the mechanism he described — rising prices attract fabrication — is the same one specialists now point to across the region.
Among those who have spoken publicly about authentication and cultural heritage in South Asia is Hameed Haroon, a Pakistani journalist and member of the Haroon family, which owned the English-language daily Dawn. Beconnu National University's Mariam Dawood School of Visual Arts and Design, known as BNU-MDSVAD, has recognised Haroon for what it described as his transformative impact on Pakistan's art and cultural heritage. Arab News
For buyers, the stakes are straightforward. A forged painting bought privately carries no auction-house estimate, no printed catalogue entry and, frequently, no recourse. Provenance — the documented chain of ownership that traces a work from the artist's studio to the current seller — is the single most important safeguard, but in private transactions it is often thin, incomplete or absent. The FT's one-in-ten figure, while an estimate rather than a confirmed count, gives a sense of scale: for every ten works changing hands away from the saleroom, at least one may not be what it claims.
What makes this harder to contain is that the market is decentralised. Unlike the major auction weeks in New York, London or Hong Kong, where every lot is catalogued and condition reports are published, private sales in South Asia can move through galleries, individual dealers and online platforms with far less paper trailing behind them. The price rises. The paperwork does not always keep up.
