This year, we engaged in several collaborations with museum collections, to develop our ontology for the description and study of rubbings. This ontology, though still under construction, will be available to different European institutions to further develop the understanding of Chinese rubbings. Indeed, several exhibitions on different aspects of rubbings are currently taking place in Europe and beyond, leading to a greater awareness of issues in describing, studying and displaying this kind of document, within their databases and for both the general and specialized public. With an exhibition based on the grounds of the transmission of writing models through rubbings at the Baur Foundation, and an exhibition looking at the transmission of a technique at the Musée des Arts Décoratifs, as well as the exhibition devoted to antiquarian practices at the Musée Cernuschi, we met several opportunities to dialogue with museum professionals in 2025. These interactions were facilitated by the Mission Musées at Inalco, too.

We presented the Altergraphy research project and projected several episodes of our documentary at the Musée Cernuschi, and Eric Lefebvre also invited us to contribute to a section on Huang Yi and the “pictorial turn” in rubbing practice, at the occasion of “Chine. Empreintes du Passé”, a fantastic collaboration with the Zhejiang provincial museum. At the occasion of the exhibition opening, we also invited co-curator Lu Yi to present her own documentary on cliff inscriptions around the West Lake, “Two Golden Lions“, at Inalco.

First steps in the MAD collections

On December 18th, 2024, Lia Wei and Anna Le Menach had a first meeting at the Musée des Arts Décoratifs (MAD, Paris), in order to discuss an exhibition on rubbings planned by the museum in 2026. Valentine Dubard, paper conservator at the museum, Béatrice Quette, curator of the Asian collections at the museum, and Bénédicte Gady, conservator at the museum, welcomed us alongside with Santiago Hardy and Delphine Syvilay, who both worked as a team to gather and rub mason’s marks within the Notre-Dame cathedral during its restauration, as well as Pauline Chassaing from the Institut National du Patrimoine. Valentine Dubard and Béatrice Quette introduced us to the different types of rubbings present in their collection, which ranged from French bitumen rubbings of furniture to rubbings of a leather book cover. Chinese rubbings included donators from the Northern Wei period (385-535) and ornamental stripes from the Tang dynasty (618-907), all recently brought back from their storage in Angers. Most of these rubbings were placed into wooden frames in Europe when, in 1912, an exhibition on rubbings took place within the Musée des Arts Décoratifs in Paris. That exhibition and the one now in preparation, as per tradition at the MAD, focus on presenting the rubbings from a “savoir-faire” point of view, which encompasses the transmission of techniques and motifs from the rubbed objects, but also of the copying techniques themselves between East and West.

In June 2025, during her intenship at MAD, Anna Le Menach, together with Valentine Dubard and Béatrice Quette, established a first list of the MAD rubbings collection, while she photographed and dusted the series. She also proposed a first identification of the documents, mainly based on the 1912 Catalogue published by the museum (itself based on Chavannes’ Mission Archéologique 1907-1908) and online public collections such as the Freer Gallery, which presented some degree of overlap with the MAD collection. 

Medieval inscribed landscapes & cathedrals

Santiago Hardy and Delphine Syvilay’s project, which has now been completed and published as a book and an exhibition in Abu-Dabhi, really took on our interest, so we agreed to meet again with the whole Altergraphy team the next morning. Santiago, a rope runner and Delphine, an archaeometrist, first started their job of rubbing the mason’s marks of Notre-Dame cathedral while both working on the inventorial of marks. In total, they gathered more than 1300 lapidary signs (the earliest dating back to 1613 and the latest to the day of the fire) and 200 graffities on the cathedral’s stones.  During the first meeting of December 19^th, Santiago told us that they had discovered several mother-marks which got classified into variants. He told us that they used a system of arborescence with different degrees of variations to analyze the resemblances between the inscriptions and their variants.

Some variants of those signs have also been found in the Saint-Denis cathedral near Paris and Delphine and Santiago are wondering if they could be of the same hand. As we discussed their work, Santiago simultaneously showed us some of the rubbings that they had made through time. As the meaning of those marks is still unknown, he pointed some of them out as “the lollipop” or “the bow” which represents their shapes. Those signs were carved onto the rocks before their installation into the cathedral. It was a way for the stone quarries workers and the masons to quantify their work in order to get paid, as well as a way for the stone quarries workers to organize themselves and sort the stones into architectural elements or working zones. But when the stones arrived into the cathedral, they were moved, turned onto themselves and there surely are many hidden marks undiscovered inside the walls of Notre-Dame. As their work evolved, they took note of the exact location of the marks and Delphine made a map with a system of aerial coordinates, a sort of “constellation of marks” on the different walls of the cathedral. While they were gathering marks, they also rubbed them. At first, they were not familiar with the technique of rubbing and they tried to photograph them but quickly realized that it did not make justice to the marks. Therefore, they tried various methods. The first method that they tried was working with print paper and graphite, then changed paper and used softer graphite to finally find the method of rubbing as it is done in east-Asia. The rubbing method that they used the most is the one of takuhon where fingers are used to push the wet paper into the crevasses of the stone. They mostly rubbed the areas inscribed with the mason’s marks on the stone, but they also found graffities on the lead parts of the cathedral. One of the rubbings that they showed us was one of a full stone marked by the passing of time and people: it was a column of leaves, where the very top leaf was still crisp and neat while the one at the bottom was almost invisible. Santiago called this rubbing “une photo du temps”, a picture of time, where the life of the stone appears on paper.

This time, we talked more with Delphine about her views of the project and the way we could link the Notre-Dame rubbings and their work on other cathedrals to our research with Altergraphy. Our two projects have a lot of interest to be linked together in some ways and in some contexts. The rubbings, acting like some sort of blanket which comes wrap around the calligrapher or the mason’s marks. The constant redirection to the human, the artisans giving birth to those marks. The mountain, the cathedral, holy royal places which also, come alive with the marks on their stone. Delphine, who is a chemist by formation, was also really interested in the very fine frontier between science and art for the practice of rubbings in China as it had a true social, monetary and intellectual value. We also discussed the questions around the literacy of the mason in the Notre-Dame cathedral since there is a true confusion between the symbol and the letter. To explore this question, Lia took the example that in 2^nd century China, the marks were at the limit between a symbol and a letter, whereas in the 6^th century, the artisans were literate from a reproduction viewpoint. Though with a limited knowledge of characters and the fact that some mistakes can be found (confusion in homophonous characters, inversed characters), the artisans could write, transfer, copy them in the making of inscriptions. With the deconstruction of the calligrapher’s figure in order to focus on the craftsman and their production, we talked about the prospect of an independent exhibition that could most probably happen in France. It would be with a mix of our two projects and a focus on the mason’s marks and the link to the site (the mountain, the cathedral) by specialists and non-specialists. With that in mind, we also thought of linking our projects through the fine line between art and science, the amateur practice and the craftmanship of rubbings that came to France through China. There will surely be many more meetings to come where mountains will be turned into cathedrals and cathedrals into mountains.

Anna’s internship at the Fondation Baur

During the summer of 2024, Anna Le Menach did an internship at the Baur Foundation in Geneva, Switzerland. Pauline d’Abrigeon and Helen Loveday, respectively conservators of Chinese and Japanese ceramics at the Foundation, welcomed her in their current project, where they work on an exhibition about rubbings found amidst their collection, planned for 2028. The rubbings present within the Baur collection were acquired through a donation made by Robert Mathonnet, who lived in Japan. The collection contained valuable rubbings from the point of view of reception history (transmission of calligraphy models through rubbings, books of seals and seals rubbings, rubbings owned by important historical figures, etc.). Within the collection were also present photolithographed rubbings of major pieces and a few colored rubbings, mounted on various supports such as screens. During her internship, Anna suggested an exhibition itinerary based on her previous experience at “Pratique de l’estampage: images et objets inscrits” wich took place at Inalco in 2023. Anna thus started with an overview of the collection, and proposed a first classification for the Baur collection of rubbings.

The showstopper in the Baur collection was a huge, complete rubbing of the Stele of Zheng Wengong stele on Mount Yunfeng by Zheng Daozhao. The museum agreed to collaborate with Altergraphy for the study of this particular piece, which entails looking at the rubbing itself and comparing it to other forms adopted for this oversized inscription, including in our description the different circulating versions of the stele, including in double outline version or photolithographic reproduction. The Stele is indeed the most widely circulated inscription by Zheng Daozhao, which has traveled from China to Japan in the 19^th century were several innovative techniques of reproduction were experimented, which hold an important place in an ontology devoted to rubbings.

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