via Politico, 13 March 2024: István Zelnik, a former Hungarian diplomat turned collector, has stirred controversy with his vast private collection of Asian art, including a gold Buddha from Cambodia’s royal court. His dealings shed light on the complex and often opaque world of antiquities trade, where items of significant cultural heritage, like those in Zelnik’s 80,000-piece collection, are sold with minimal oversight. This practice raises concerns among experts and governments about the legality and ethics of such sales, especially when the provenance of these artifacts, often from countries like Cambodia, remains dubious.
Now in his seventies, Zelnik is a polarizing figure in the small world of Southeast Asian archaeology. Well-connected in Cambodian government circles, and a longtime patron of cultural heritage sites in the country, he is the owner of what he claims to be one of the largest private collections of Asian art in Europe: some 80,000 objects ranging from Burmese amulets to Chinese shipwreck porcelain to gold relics from the precolonial Champa Kingdom located in what is now southern Vietnam.
Zelnik’s collection isn’t just exceptional for its size. Because of an aborted attempt to run a private museum in Budapest, its contents were cataloged and made public, offering outsiders a tantalizing glimpse at the mountains of history, art and culture Zelnik managed to amass. Since then, however, the collection has slipped back behind the veil of private ownership, as individual objects are put up for sale and dispersed by auction houses in Antwerp and Vienna.
According to the auction listing, Zelnik bought the Buddha in 1980 from an official in Cambodia’s then Vietnam-backed government; with an asking price of $3,000 to $10,000, it’s among the thousands of artifacts he has sold.
Cambodia has never issued an export license for any antiquity and considers the statue “as illegally removed from the country,” Gordon said. As for the identity of the official who sold the statue to Zelnik, he added, authorities are in the dark and interested in learning more.
Source: An ex-diplomat and king’s head: Inside the secret global trade of Asian art – POLITICO
