The Matter of Chinese Painting, Case studies of 8th century murals

Studies in Conservation, 2016

A great number of Central Asian wall paintings, archeological materials, architectural fragments, and textiles, as well as painting fragments on silk and paper, make up the so called Turfan Collection at the Asian Art Museum in Berlin. The largest part of the collection comes from the Kucha region, a very important cultural center in the third to ninth centuries. Between 1902 and 1914, four German expeditions traveled along the northern Silk Road. During these expeditions, wall paintings were detached from their original settings in Buddhist cave complexes. This paper reports a technical study of a wall painting, existing in eight fragments, from the Buddhist cave no. 40 (Ritterhöhle). Its original painted surface is soot blackened and largely illegible. Grünwedel, leader of the first and third expeditions, described the almost complete destruction of the rediscovered temple complex and evidence of fire damage. The aim of this case study is to identify the materials used for the wall paintings. Furthermore, soot deposits as well as materials from conservation interventions were of interest. Non-invasive analyses were preferred but a limited number of samples were taken to provide more precise information on the painting technique. By employing optical and scanning electron microscopy, energy dispersive X-ray spectroscopy, micro X-ray fluorescence spectroscopy, X-ray diffraction analysis, and Raman spectroscopy, a layer sequence of earthen render, a ground layer made of gypsum, and a paint layer containing a variety of inorganic pigments were identified.

TAASA Review, 2016

Recent archaeological discoveries in Shaanxi Province are new shedding light on China’s ancient tradition of mural painting. In May 2014, the University of Melbourne’s Grimwade Centre for Cultural Materials Conservation (GCCMC) has formally partnered with the Shaanxi Provincial Institute of Archaeology (SPIA) to scientifically analyse these paintings and uncover lost knowledge about the technical history of Chinese mural painting.

The temple at Yao Wang Shan, built in 1272 c.e., during the reign of Zhi Yuan, contains one of the three or four remain ing examples of a specific image of a Daoist painting from the Yuan dynasty. This image is called chaoyuantu, which can be translated as "Chart for Facing the Origin" or "Worshiping the Origin."

Studies in Conservation, 2009

UC Berkeley dissertation, 2024

This is the introduction to my dissertation, along with a short section of the first chapter containing chapter-summaries. Abstract: This dissertation examines sub-elite traditions of wall-painting in rural north China, focusing specifically on the period between roughly 1500 and 1949. I base this study on over two years of field surveys between 2013-18, combined with an extensive textual corpus of temple epigraphy (steles), as well as many other sources. In the Introduction, I examine the ways these widespread sub-elite visual cultures have become invisible within our constructions of “Chinese art” today. Denigrated by Neo-Confucian literati and modernist intellectuals alike, murals were targeted for destruction by successive regimes from the late nineteenth century to present. In the Chapter One, I present my own field-survey of murals in the rural counties west of Beijing, carried out over several years between 2013 and 2018. This survey overlaps in systematic ways with prior surveys, especially the studies of temple iconographies carried out in the 1940s by Belgian missionary Willem Grootaers. I then sketch a social history of this built landscape based on epigraphy, arguing that most of what Grootaers saw was created in a relatively brief period of the sixteenth century, during which the villages of the rural north were reconstructed en masse in response to Mongol raids. I show how this landscape was maintained over the longue durée by shifting configurations of state actors, monastic institutions, lay associations and donor consortia, lineage organizations, and “ritual minorities” including sectarian groups, Tibeto-Mongol Buddhists, Muslims, and Christians. Chapter Two examines painters and their sources. I begin by examining our scant documentary record of “picture-artisans” (huajiang) in early-modern north China, using inscriptions and other sources to reconstruct their training, numbers, motions in space, and social status. I then turn to a formal genre of mural I call “panel-caption” paintings, i.e. murals divided into discrete scenes with textual cartouches. I show that almost all such murals did have external textual sources, the existence of which was central to painters’ perception of the legitimacy of their own work. Nevertheless, painters drew freely on their own understanding of these texts to fill the walls, in some cases reciprocally shaping their source-narratives to reflect their own concerns. In Chapter Three, I turn to the donor communities, and to stele inscriptions as a rhetorical genre. While Ming-Qing stele texts seldom give detailed iconographic descriptions of murals, I argue that these texts centrally theorize temples as aesthetic objects in relation to self-organizing political and votive “publics.” In this discourse, visual “brightness,” as well as a host of other aesthetic categories, are understood to represent the civic community both to the gods and to itself. Chapter Four turns specifically to the most widespread formal genre of murals in north China, which depict the gods riding out on one wall, and returning on the other. Imagery of meeting and parting with cloud-borne deities and ancestors stretches back into pre-imperial poetic texts and tomb depictions. Nevertheless, I argue that “out-and-back” compositions as a genre of above- ground temple-painting rose to prominence in China during the Tang-Song transition. I show how newly-empowered votive communities appropriated ancient poetic forms and iconographic tropes to legitimize their deities of place, and how procession-networks of “welcoming” and “seeing-off” these mobile deities came to physically shape the religious landscape of early- modern China. Chapter Five turns to problems of representation and verisimilitude in Chinese temple images. I argue that Chinese writers since pre-Han times had understood visual mimesis as gendered female, and powerfully provocative of emotional and supernatural “response.” In the early- modern period, such theories physically structured temple halls, in which numinous power was concentrated in eroticised “inner palaces” located behind the central altar. I then examine these uncanny “interiorities” in the context of the opera-stage paintings, as well as village muralists’ encounter with European illusionistic techniques like cast-shadows, point-perspective, etc. from the eighteenth century onward. I argue that the specific tropes of temple iconography were used to construct multiple types of ontologically alteric spaces, including femininity, fictionality, and foreignness. Finally, in a short Coda, I reflect on a few of my own encounters with village muralists in 2018, and on the fate of these traditions in the modern era.

s Egyptological career can hardly be contained within any single descriptor, and we are all grateful for this whether we read her contributions on language, law, women, or ethnicity -or whether we benefit from her career project, the Demotic Dictionary. It is with sincere admiration and appreciation of Jan's dedication to our field and its breadth that I venture to submit this discussion that combines art, social history, and philology.

Tracing Technoscapes: The Production of Bronze Age Wall Paintings in the Eastern Mediterranean. Sidestone Press, 2018

Developed from a paper given at the interdisciplinary workshop held at the 10th ICAANE in Vienna, this paper discusses the original painting construction, methods, techniques and materials used in Theban elite private tombs of the 18th Dynasty. The findings are based on research, archaeometry, conservation work, as well as experimental archaeology. Using this multiple research method and the associated findings it attempts to answer some of the questions most frequently asked about the construction and decoration of painted tomb chapels.

This wall paintings technology study in Xialu Temple was carried out by in situ investigations and laboratory analysis. The techniques used to analyze pigments, ground/white preparations, and binding media were: optical microscopy carried out with visible reflected light and ultraviolet light; polarized light microscopy; micro-Raman spectroscopy; micro-Fourier transform infrared spectroscopy; and scanning electron microscopy. The characterization of pigments, including the discovery of two rare organic pigments, improves knowledge about traditional Tibetan paintings. The analysis of the binding media and different types of ground/white preparations (asbestos, kaolin, and illite) allowed us to identify different stratigraphic compositions. Our findings indicate that the study areas were painted during at least four different time periods.

Studies in Conservation, 2012

The collaboration between Egypt's Supreme Council of Antiquities (SCA) and the Getty Conservation Institute (GCI) to conserve the tomb of Tutankhamen in the Valley of the Kings provided an opportunity for in-depth investigation of the techniques and original materials of the burial chamber wall paintings. Examination through visual observations, in situ microscopy and ex situ analysis of samples identified discrepancies in setting-out and preliminary procedures and variance in planning and execution from wall to wall. These incongruities can be explained by workshop practice and other constraints, not uncommon in ancient Egyptian tomb execution. However, they additionally support the premise that the early death of the young Pharaoh, and the subsequent adaptation of a pre-existing tomb, had a significant impact on its construction and decoration. Moreover, it is possible that these unique circumstances contributed to particular forms of deterioration, most notably the extensive presence of brown spots on the painting scheme. Reassessing the technical history of the tomb is therefore an essential first step in formulating appropriate approaches to its current conservation.

Colourful surface treatments form an integral element of vernacular and élite architecture of ancient societies. The iconography of ancient murals provides modern beholders with information about past realities as well as interconnections between different visual systems.

2013

The present research was carried out to obtain more information on materials and painting techniques used in Egyptian wall paintings during the 19th century. The Hawsh al-Basha courtyard, dating back to Mohammed Ali's family period (1805-1952,) was studied for this purpose. The obtained results will be used to set up a scientific plan for restoration and preservation. Pigments, including white zincite, earth green, blue synthetic ultramarine, yellow massicot, black a mixture of magnetite & graphite, brownish red lead and brass were identified. The binding medium in the painting was identified as animal glue. Two preparation layers were identified: the inner coarse ground layer, composed of gypsum as a major component, with calcite and small amounts of quartz and the outer, fine ground layer, composed of calcite only. Optical Microscopy (OM), Scanning Electron Microscopy coupled with Energy Dispersive X-ray Microanalysis (SEM-EDX), X-ray Diffraction (XRD) and Fourier Transform In...

Art History, 2002

Journal of Visual Art and Design, 2021

This paper highlights trends in the development of contemporary visual art in China through a parallel analysis of two of its components: painting and enamel art. The focus of the research is on the work of artists whose works combine a ‘western’ style with ‘eastern’ tradition. It was found that in the 21st century, the layer of Chinese cultural heritage was successfully transformed into new forms of expression, such as art objects, enamel sculptures, brightly colored paintings and more. At the same time, it has preserved the symbolism of color, plasticity of lines, narrative and figurative components, which is typical of the centuries-old traditions of the Celestial Empire. Artistic analysis was carried out on specific pictorial and enamel examples, distinguishing common and distinctive features in the concepts of the artists and their embodiment in the material. The way in which contemporary art enters the urban space of megacities and the interior of public institutions was analy...