A Story Idea Each Day for a Month — Day 22

This is the fifth year in a row I’ve run this series in April.

Today’s story: Struggling Immigrant Artist Tied to $80 Million New York Fraud.

Pei-Shen Qian’s neighbors on 95th Street in Woodhaven, Queens, knew he scratched out a living as an artist: he often dried his paintings in the sun, propping them up on the weathered white siding of his modest house.

They were less clear on why he kept his windows covered, or why every so often a man in an expensive car would come to the house carrying paintings to, not from, a painter.

“He would bring a painting in and show it to him, for him to work on or fix up something,” Edwin Gardiner, 68, who lives across the street, said before pausing and adding, “I don’t know what he did with it.”

Parts of the mystery became clearer on Friday as neighbors learned that Mr. Qian, a quiet 73-year-old immigrant from China in a paint-flecked smock, is suspected of having fooled the art world by creating dozens of works that were modeled after America’s Modernist masters and were later sold as their handiwork for more than $80 million.

Mr. Qian, who came here more than four decades ago and struggled to sell his own works in this country, earned just a few thousand dollars for each of his imitations. New York was a center of the art world, but Mr. Qian told friends that he had been disheartened by the difficulties he encountered finding a foothold as an artist.

“He was kind of frustrated because of the language problem, the connection problem,” said Zhang Hongtu, a friend and acclaimed Chinese artist who lives in New York. “He was not that happy.”

Mr. Qian’s low profile as a painter has evaporated; federal authorities have decided that he was the artist whose fakes are at the heart of one of the bolder art frauds in recent memory.

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Over a period of 15 years, court papers claim, the painter, working out of his home studio and garage, churned out at least 63 drawings and paintings that carried the signatures of artistic giants like Jackson Pollock, Barnett Newman, Robert Motherwell and Richard Diebenkorn, and that Mr. Bergantiños Diaz and Ms. Rosales boasted were authentic. They were not copies of paintings, but were sold as newly “discovered” works by those artists.

Ms. Rosales sold or consigned the art to two elite Manhattan dealers, Knoedler & Company — New York City’s oldest gallery until it closed in 2011 — and a former Knoedler employee named Julian Weissman, who in turn sold them for millions of dollars to customers who placed their faith in the dealers’ reputations and the supporting words of some experts.

Pei-Shen Qian

This story is interesting enough, you could just do it as is, but I have two other takes, both of which involve the Protagonist (let’s go ahead and call him Qian) getting thrown in prison for his involvement in a fake art scam. I want to zero in on this piece of Qian’s actual backstory:

Long before Mr. Qian settled in Queens, he worked as an artist. He grew up in the island city of Zhoushan and in Shanghai, according to a 2004 interview with a Chinese television station. When he was in his 30s, Mr. Qian took part in a daring experimental art movement in Shanghai in the late 1970s as the Cultural Revolution was ending.

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By the 1990s, Mr. Qian was becoming increasingly disenchanted with his own work. A fellow artist, Chen Danqing, recalled that period in an article he wrote for a Chinese art magazine in 2006. “The things we had done before became like dust in the wind,” he wrote. He described his friend, then in his 40s, as “homesick” and “lost.”

Mr. Qian is represented by a gallery in China. But in recent years, his neighbors said, he still spoke frequently, unprompted, of his dissatisfaction with his career in the United States.

“When he was over in China he would feel like a rock star, because when he would walk out on the street everybody knew him,” Mary Ann Gardiner, Edwin Gardiner’s wife, recalls Mr. Qian saying. “It was like night and day.”

In China, Qian was a well-known legitimate artist. In the U.S., he struggled to survive and turned to the art scam simply to make a living.

I see that and I sniff Disunity which for me is key to a compelling Protagonist, giving them a great psychological starting place.

So take #1: Qian is found guilty and is sent to prison. Can his life get any worse? During his time in the United States, he has been living a secret life, an incredible talent at copying other artists, but unable to break through with his own art. At least, however, he had an apartment. And a car. He had enough money to attend his beloved cultural events in New York. But now, he’s behind bars, surrounded by inmates who don’t look like him, don’t act like him, and have zero interest in the cultural arts.

At least, that what Qian thinks. After hardships, traumas and the inevitable conflict he experiences in prison, what if Qian manages to use the prison black market to get a paintbrush, some paint, and a canvas? And what if another prisoner notices him painting… and expresses curiosity. What if that creates a bridge between these two disparate souls with Qian teaching the prisoner how to paint? What if other prisoners seek out Qian to teach them?

It’s The Shawshank Redemption meets Pollock.

The second take is a bit less obvious, but I think perhaps more interesting. Let’s switch the Protagonist to a woman named Wynette, a famous painter whose life has fallen into disrepair. Failed relationships, addictions, inner demons that once fueled her unique creative vision, but never confronted or tamed, eating away at her. She hasn’t painted anything successfully in over a decade. Basically a shell of a human, living on a dwindling savings account, stringing out her days.

A knock on the door. A former sales agent. Brings in a painting. Wynette stares at it. One of her early pieces of art. Startling to see the strong, confident brush strokes and bold imagery.

“That’s not yours,” the sales agent says. “It’s a fake.”

Wynette spends the night, studying the painting, shocked to see how incredibly accurate the fraudulent version is.

She calls the sales agent.

“I want to meet him,” she says.

“Meet who,” the sales agent asks.

“The painter.”

Of course, that would mean Wynette has to go to the prison where Qian is currently housed. Imagine that first meeting. Qian would know who Wynette is, honored to meet her. But what is Wynette’s motivation for this decision?

After a few scenes in which Wynette gets some measure of who Qian is and processes that information, here’s the kicker: She wants Qian to ‘teach’ Wynette how to paint like she used to. Wynette has lost her creative intuition. Qian has it.

“Will you help me?”

Clearly this is one of those indie dramas that takes place over a period of months, maybe even years. And maybe each helps the other to find their authentic creative voice. In the process, two broken souls, both at the tail end of their lives, confront the forces contributing to their respective states of Disunity, enabling them to move toward Unity. Who knows? Maybe Wynette gets involved in advocating for Qian’s early release from prison. And maybe the very last scene of the movie is Qian stepping outside the prison for the first time in years… and there is Wynette to greet him. Freeze frame.

There you go: My twenty second story idea for the month. And it’s yours. Free!

What would you do with it?

Each day this month, I invite you to join me in comments to do some brainstorming. Gender bend, genre bend, what if. Take each day’s story idea and see what it can become when we play around with it. These are all valuable skills for a writer to develop.

See you in comments (hit Reply to join the conversation). And come back tomorrow for another Story Idea Each Day For A Month.

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