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From the Met \u2013 public domain<\/p>\n From the Met \u2013 public domain<\/p>\n
A major arts and heritage conservation project in China has born unexpected fruit thousands of miles away in New York City.<\/p>\n
In the Chinese arts and antiquities gallery of the Metropolitan Museum of Art, a 50-foot-long mural devours the attention of an entire room with its arrangement of Buddha and his attendants.<\/p>\n
The Medicine Buddha mural<\/a> had long attracted the wonder of Zhang Jian, director of the \u201cMeticulous Painting Institute\u201d at the Chinese National Academy of Arts, which since 2013 has poured billions of Chinese RMB into restoring, conserving, and repatriating Chinese artifacts around the country and the world.<\/p>\n Describing it as wielding an \u201cawe-inspiring energy,\u201d Zhang learned that the mural was originally located in the ancient Guangsheng Temple in central China. Standing in its halls years later, staring at the vacant space where the massive mural had originally hung, Zhang was struck with an idea.<\/p>\n Over the next 3 years, he led a team of special artists and conservationists to the Met to meticulously\u2014excruciatingly\u2014copy the mural for a life-sized replica that captures every single crack, faded contour, and conservationist correction it had faced in its 700 years on the Earth.<\/p>\n This project was made possible with the unerring support of the Met itself, a collaboration which marks arguably the highest ever undertaken between Chinese and American cultural institutes.<\/p>\n Now in October, the Met is to co-host an international symposium in Beijing about Chinese murals, marking the first time the New York museum has jointly held a major academic conference in China with a national research body.<\/p>\n Jason Sun, the Met\u2019s curator of Chinese art, told the South China Morning Post<\/a> that the results achieved by Zhang\u2019s team\u2014including the realization that conservators had incorrectly arranged the mural segments so that Lord Buddha\u2019s head was 2 centimeters off kilter\u2014as having \u201cprofound historical and practical significance.\u201d<\/p>\n Painted around 700 years ago during the Mongol-administered Yuan Dynasty, on clay tiles mixed with rice straw, the mural depicts the Medicine Buddha seated with his chief attendants surrounded by numerous figures.<\/p>\n Yet its presence in the Met isn\u2019t the result of it being a plundered relic. Mainland China was mostly free from Western colonial occupation when the impoverished monks from Guangsheng Temple chopped the mural up into sections and sold it to fix the collapsing roof of their temple.<\/p>\n Among the keystones of Buddha\u2019s teachings is the unavoidable truth that all things are impermanent, so if they were good students of the Great Sage, those impoverished monks would not have hesitated to part with the relic, that traded hands across the West until it arrived at the Met via donation from Arthur Sackler in 1965.<\/p>\n The China National Arts Fund, a state-endowed philanthropic fund established in 2013 under the National Academy of Arts, was as recently as 2025 tasked specifically with the preservation of ancient murals and other works. So far, 40 ancient murals from caves and temples across Western China have been painstakingly examined and copied, but if they are held overseas, the Fund has the directive to pay for their study, and potentially, their recreation.<\/p>\n Yet Zhang had a different sort of intention for that recreation: one that the Met administrators enthusiastically supported. In 2024, SCMP reports that the Fund had formalized a research partnership with the Met, whereby the famous museum granted their colleagues in East Asia full authorization for prolonged detailed study of the work, and the sharing of ultra-high-resolution digital images.<\/p>\n CHINESE MURALS IN THE NEWS:\u00a0Stunning Tang Dynasty Mural Unearthed in China Portrays a \u2018Westerner\u2019 with Blonde Hair<\/a><\/p>\n \u201cThe Met staff actively coordinated with visitors for us,\u201d said Meng Ying, an artist on Zhang\u2019s team which visited the Met 3 times over the following years. \u201cThough our lifts and lighting equipment occasionally blocked sightlines, visitors were remarkably understanding.\u201d<\/p>\n As Meng said, studying portions of the work required specialized hydraulic lifts and expansive light fixtures, conditions which he described as being \u201cunprecedented\u201d in the history of the Met. This went on for days at a time, while the team poured their attention onto the smallest details to reproduce exactly what it was that the Guangsheng Temple was missing.<\/p>\n This included using clay-rich mud and rice straw to make the tiles, which they sourced from as close to the temple as possible. It involved extensive studying into the mineral pigments\u2014considering what would have been available to the medieval painters, and how such materials could have changed over 700 years.<\/p>\n \u201cLighting, digital cameras ,and printing all change how a color looks. We had to tweak our paints over and over again on site,\u201d said Han Maoyuan, another artist on the team.<\/p>\n