Ideal Matches

What is authenticity? What is true love? How do we recognize a real work of art? Ideal Matches, Li Yu's comic masterpiece from the 1650's--here translated for the first time into English--explores these perennial questions. The play follows two luminaries who, weary of constant requests for their work, seek "ghost artists" who can help them field requests for their paintings and calligraphy. They encounter uncannily brilliant forgeries of their works done by two women-a courtesan and a woman from a poor family. Multiple plot twists involving cross-dressing, impersonation, and mistaken identity propel the story toward its happy ending, or its "ideal matches." Set in the early seventeenth century, the characters are based on historical late Ming cultural figures who would have been well-known to Li Yu's contemporaries. Here, they are recast with humor and poignancy as figures caught between the real and the fake, aspiration and external judgment, artistic passion and the pressures of the marketplace. The play embraces the structure of romantic comedy while overturning assumptions about the genre. True love and economic calculations intertwine; counterfeit artworks reveal deep truths; and the most perfect unions emerge between unlikely subjects--artists and their forgers. With wit and incisive cultural insight, Ideal Matches asks probing questions about agency, authenticity, true love, and talent--questions that are just as important today as they were in seventeenth-century China.