Chinese Art at the MFA, 960–1279: Discoveries and Transformations (Song Dynasty)

join me now in welcoming our presenter [Applause] Thank You jasmine and thank you all for coming out on this difficult night and day and and welcome and I want to welcome you to the gallery as well this gallery just opened earlier this year and it's dedicated to the art of the Song Dynasty the Song Dynasty is an extremely special time in Chinese history it is really the great Golden Age of Chinese art and we are spectacularly fortunate here at the Museum of Fine Arts to have some of the great masterpieces of some art here and which is one of the reasons we felt it was really worthy of our dedicating a gallery space not just to the time period not just to the artworks but as well to the aesthetics of this time period so people can begin to understand what the really aesthetic revolution that happened in this time period was before we go on I'm going to give you one not so aesthetic slide just so you can have a little bit of the lay of the land and the lay of the time and just think about where we are in the history of time soon dynasties from 960 to 1279 so that was the Middle Ages in Europe it was the time of the Crusaders Genghis Khan as well as Chichen Itza in South America was happening so it was before the Ming Dynasty before the Renaissance and for the Ching dynasty and the American Revolution it was a long time ago it was about a thousand years ago so okay now you know where we're located timewise and now I just want to give you a little bit of a picture we don't obviously have photographs of the Song Dynasty but we do have some paintings that were done of the environment at that time period this was this is a small detail of a very long hand scroll one that's sometimes called the Mona Lisa of Chinese art and it depicts probably the capital city if not the capital city some other very very large city in some Dynasty China this is just one detail and you can see what an urban culture it was the capital city of the Song Dynasty during the the first half of the Song Dynasty with a place we now call Chi Fung it's called been Jing at the time bingeing had a population of a million people a lot of people it was the largest city in the world at the time and you can see how mobbed it was there this painting shows shops it shows all different types of people coming in from the countryside officials have one other detail here you can see some of the shops there all types of restaurants happening street sellers there are art galleries everything you can imagine is going on in Penjing at this time period the population between the Tong dynasty and the Song Dynasty over a period of about a hundred years when in China for the whole country from 50 million to 100 million so it and that is about a third of what the US population is today it's an enormous number of people and when you start putting a lot of people together like that and they start talking and having conversations a lot bubbles out of a society and so it was an incredibly innovative time not just in their humanities and the arts but also in the sciences it was time when gunpowder was suddenly being used in the military people started using compasses printing was happening movable type was happening all of this as you can imagine long before any of these innovations started happening in Europe and at the same time there were a lot of innovations and really aesthetic revolutions happening in the art world it was the height of realism in China this is a painting we just put it up yesterday or the day before so you can see it's a wonderful painting nobody is really sure who did it but it was in the Imperial collection for many years and it's images of a number of men on horses who are definitely not Chinese but nomads and we still have not actually determined what tribes they are from different possibilities but if you look at the painting it's done with such sensitive naturalism and that's something that really came to a height in the Song Dynasty and once it came to a height something else happened there was a rebellion against naturalism and realism they were philosophers at this time period who said anybody who's really interested in naturalism probably has the mentality of a child so it was a little bit like the 1950s when suddenly people started doing abstract art and a lot of the intellectual scholars at the time period and who were rebelling against this realism started to do much more expressionistic painting and really focusing on abstract qualities of art in the ability of art to express the inner integrity of the individual who is doing the artwork this is another painting also something in our collection and really one of the great masterpieces of Chinese art it's called the nine Dragons this is a small detail of it it's actually about 50 feet long and is just wonderfully expressive monochrome because these scholar artists were not interested in color they thought color was just tacky and seductive and they were just more interested in in expression that comes directly with ink so and this is also on exhibit up right now and I urge you to go up and look at it and enjoy it i mister just two pieces of ceramics we have a lot of other pieces up there as well the piece on the right is a piece of Roux where this was the Imperial Household wares like your wedding plates that you have but this was for the Imperial Household for about 30 years and during the northern Song Dynasty I in about 1125 the northern song was taken over and the palace was destroyed and almost all of this ceramic where was destroyed there's only 60 pieces left in the world today and we are incredibly fortunate to have one of them here at the MFA there's only four in the United States but when I talk about aesthetics this is pure song aesthetics there's no decoration it's just purity of shape and subtle color and it's an aesthetic that eventually also spread to Japan and sometimes we tend to associate is very subtle restrained a vision with Japan alone but in fact this was very much part of China and a lot of Chinese today particularly young people are tending to go back to the song aesthetic again they're seeing something very Chinese about the song and another thing that happened in the Song Dynasty was a greater rise of Buddhism and interest particularly in one Buddhist figure Guan Yin and a lot of that what we're going to focus on today is this very special guanine sculpture that we've had here since 1920 at the the MFA came here and it was on display until 1999 without stop and it was really a favorite of visitors to the MFA the image is Guan Yin and let me just give you a little bit of a sense of who this figure is Guan Yin was a bodhisattva not a Buddha but a bodhisattva what is a bodhisattva a bodhisattva is somebody who almost becomes a Buddha that is a Buddha is somebody who has escaped the cycle of birth and rebirth in Buddhism life is considered to be suffering and one wants to escape the sidle of cycle of birth and rebirth and become a Buddha and go up to Nirvana and anybody can become a Buddha the Bodhisattva is somebody who was about to become a Buddha and decided and instead of being a Buddha they would come back to earth to be amongst mortals and to help other mortals become Buddhas so the Bodhisattva is considered a very compassionate very merciful figure who is here to serve all mortals in in whatever way they might need and Buddhism began in India and so the earliest images that we have of guanine are from India and then of course we have the Buddhism came to China about the 1st 2nd century AD and so we have many early images from China as well as images from Japan so you could take yourself on a Guanyin pilgrimage around our museum now something happened when I first came to the MFA I was giving a talk right in this room and it didn't have anything to do with the Song Dynasty or Guan Yin and at the end of my talk I said to people does anybody have any questions and one woman stood up and she had an 8 by 10 photograph of the Guan Yin that I was just telling you about and she said when is this coming back on to you so that became one of my missions was to see if we could bring Guan Yin back on view and soon after that somebody walked into my office and she said that she had had a friend who had passed away recently and her friend with a serious Buddhist and she wanted to donate money towards a Buddhist project at the MFA in her friends honor and I said well we have this amazing project we've got this amazing Guanyin let's go down into storage and see how it looks so this is guan yin and storage she was looking okay but the paint was flaking and so we knew was very much in need of a conservation job and so this woman donated money and then other people donated money and we are incredibly grateful to all the many people who donated money to bring quan yin back on view i just want to talk a little bit more about the guan yin because when we were doing the conservation when Abby was doing the conservation we were also doing research it was a wonderful opportunity to do research and one of the things that we noticed at the back of the Guan Yin were these characters and what they say is Zhi Shan which is the name of a county in China two County in Shanxi Province down in the southwestern corner of Shaanxi province and if you see here Chi Fung that was where the capital of the Song Dynasty was and so this is just about 200 miles from Kaifeng just to give you a little bit more of a sense of where Keshawn county is that's Beijing up in the northeast and southwest of Zhi Shan is Cheyenne where the terracotta soldiers are nff ed D Shan was very close to - so it was a prosperous area as I said at this time period there were a lot of devotees - Guan Yin many many temples were being built so I decided I would go off to Zhi Shan to see what I could learn this is an image of it there are a lot of mountains lots and lots of temples and this is one temple in Dijon County not very big as you can see I was looking to see if I could find the original temple that our Guan Yin came from and when I went in this I realized it was definitely not where Guan Yin came from but this is a God our goddess of fertility basically which in China as you'll see is a very important type of goddess and probably yet in everywhere but this is another temple that we went to that had another Guan Yin and this is another Guan Yin from the Song Dynasty it's clay and I learned a lot from this Guan Yin first of all I learned the type of pedestal that our Guan Yin probably was originally sitting on I also look down at the bottom of the Guan Yin you'll see all these little dolls and that's because Guan Yin really also did become almost a fertility goddess if you one reads the guanine suture you see that Guan Yin will do anything for almost anybody and over time many women started worshipping Guan Yin in the hopes of having children and the custom became that once you worship one in and asked for children and if you had a child you would bring back an offering of a little doll and people still do that today and there there were many many little dolls all around this Guan Yi another interesting thing that I learned about from this Quan Yin was the height that our Guan Yin is would have originally been seen at so I asked this friend of mine actually to stand next to the bunion so we can measure it this Guan Yin here that we see in situ is about the same size as our going in so this really helped us as we were trying to decide what height to place going in at I went to another temple and I'm sorry about the funny angle of this image but it was under restoration was actually under scaffolding so I had to sneak under the scaffolding to try to take this image but this is an image of Guan Yin it's been a bit restored but look at the colors the the flesh tone of the of the torso and Abby will be talking about that a little bit later because if you recall on our Guan Yin the flat the the skin is now gold another interesting aspect of this Guan Yin is that off to the side was this smaller figure of a disciple worshiping Quan Yin and Abby is going to tell you a little bit more about that later so our Guan Yin was probably originally in a very similar type of setting with imagery either 3-dimensional or painted of water behind I also traveled a lot around the area to other temples there is fantastic sculpture in this region that unbelievably has survived for a thousand years these are also from the Song Dynasty the one on the left is a Buddhist sculpture the one on the right is a Taoist sculpture but you can see this intense naturalism that was so prevalent during the Song Dynasty these sculptures look like they were modeled after humans and they're also very human compassionate and real and and worshipers could really relate to these beings in a very different way than they would have related to earlier sculptures one thing I did not see in any of the temples in that region were wooden sculptures and people told me that there are no wooden sculptures left Institute in any of the temples the reason is probably is because the wind sculptures were removable in nineteen teens in the 1920s China was in a bit of political chaos people took advantage of that and took objects from the temples maybe the villagers were poor needed money decided to sell their objects we really don't know exactly how this piece eventually came to the United States but it did arrive here and I want Abby now to come up and tell us about how she prepared it for the gallery [Applause] hello so I hope maybe you've had a chance to go up to the gallery already and and see since we won Yin and enjoy the space and if not you can go up afterwards I have had the incredible privilege over the past two years to spend much of my time with Guan Yin looking at it closely and working on this project that had two goals first was to stabilize the sculpture to bring it back on view and second was to understand its complex history and its surface and how it was made and what we could learn about it as although I was the lead conservator for this project I had helped from many many of my colleagues here at the Museum and objects conservation paintings conservation furniture conservation scientific research the conservation engineers and many many other people here in the department so I'm speaking of many people's work here as Nancy's laid out I'm going in had a long history it was made in foreign Zhi Shan in northern China and it had a life in a temple therefore until 1920 and during its time in China it was redecorated and rededicated many times as as tastes change and the sculptures history of transformation also continued here at the MFA so I'm going to walk through some of those transformations and one of the things that I really love about the sculpture is and that I think is important to appreciate when you're looking at it is that it's not showing us one moment in time but in fact there's aspects from many different moments in the sculpture but together it has a very harmonious appearance it came to the museum in 1920 and here are some historical images of its installation in different galleries in this is the large Chinese sculpture gallery now Guan Yin is in the center here and in front of the wall painting of the birth of the Buddha so it did move around quite a bit it had been on continuous display open display and some of you may remember it in its last installation here in the Burnet gallery this is how I remember the sculpture and this is where I fell in love with the sculpture when I was a graduate doing part of my graduate training here as a Mellon fellow in 1994 and I used to sit on this bench almost all that almost every day I just loved to go sit there and be with the sculpture so it really was a great honor to be able to work on it the piece had been on continuous view and it had had ongoing problems with flaking paint and splitting wood and it had been there conserved repeatedly mostly in the galleries and here you see some of my colleagues carrying at one of the treatments and so part of this project was also to understand why we had been unable to stabilize the surface after all of these repeated attempts and that is why it was taken off you in 1999 a little bit about the history of the sculpture here at the MFA when it arrived in 1920 this is the first acquisition photograph you can see that the appearance is quite different the sculpture appeared white at that time it was coated with a white or cream-colored gesso like coatings so one of the other important things is to understand what happened and when and in order to understand that we have to dig through little snippets of information such as this short newspaper clipping from the Boston Herald dated August 30th 1956 and this explains ancient carving prepared for TV and this explains that the sculpture has been restored to its original coloring coloring for display to television audiences and this raises the question about color TV broadcasting this was just the advent of color broadcasting it spun likely that people were seeing this in color on television but the television lights that were brought into the museum WGBH had a studio here at the time and was experimenting with presenting art as educational and educational ways to the public bright lights on the sculpture apparently revealed some of the brighter colors underneath and I gave the curators and the staff here understanding that the surface look particularly drab we also learned learned from this clipping that William Jay young the head of the museum's laboratories found and removed six layers covering the original brilliant colors and that also raises the question are we seeing the original colors here or are we seeing a combination of things and of course the answer is we're seeing a combination of things and I'll walk us through some of that Bill Young by the way was the founder of the museum's conservation and research lab he came from England in 1929 were one of the oldest conservation conservation facilities in the United States and we're very proud of our history other evidence of the treatment was found with these two undated postcards the one on the right presumably is before treatment when the sculpture is white and on the left it says after cleaning and removal of over paint and these aren't photographs but hand colored collar types but we get a sense of the transformation here as well it's very fun to play spot the difference with these pictures because you will see things such as change in the forehead here the forehead is flat and here we see an Erna and here we can see joins forth in the wood at the arm in the legs and here we can't see these anymore so these are some some of the evidence that we looked at in deciding the how we would proceed with our treatment so before treatment this was our starting point we start all of our examinations with before treatment photography both with visible light and also with other wavelengths such as ultraviolet light it's a very basic and useful tool for conservators looking with ultraviolet light different materials have a different fluorescence and you can see here the orange for example at the belly and the arm is likely shellac which was used here historically as an in painting material we can see different adhesives in a drip of adhesive here different film materials all over you can really appreciate that this is a very complex surface that we were looking at Nancy mentioned the inscriptions on the back there's a detail we did document all of the inscriptions and we do know that these three areas of inscription on the back were all transcribed and known when the sculpture came to the MFA the one on the upper right gives the district the other to give monks names but also looking under UV we found two more lines of inscription that had not been previously transcribed or known and Nancy was able to read those that as giving a partial date the eighth month of the nineteenth year of the reign of eleven level and it also refers to rebuilding or redecoration so this gives a date of when the sculpture may have been gilded as Nancy mentioned previously the the Sunda - the aesthetic was was not not fancy natural lipstick or pinkish skin tones and here our figure has a has gilded so perhaps that's the date of that and here digitally enhanced as that inscription for those of you who can read that which is not me also we looked at the sculpture with x-ray radiography we have radiography facility here at the Museum and we carry this work out ourselves and this is a radiograph of the face the things that might stand out to you are that the bones not the bones but the nails that are appear white those are hand forged iron nails that are attaching elements of the crown you can see the strong wood grain running vertically one thing that was very very interesting is the eyes we looked at that and we thought what is this a cat what's going on those are glass beads that are used to depict the eyes and you can see the stringing holes running vertically here and here's a detail of the eyes so it's a leaded glass on black leather glass it protrudes slightly from the eye and we presume that this is an important trade item that was incorporated into the sculpture so the eyes are glass but the urna was Plexiglas or plastic and that as we could see from the postcards and other documentation had been added in the 1950s probably an imitation of rock crystal and probably within all good intentions but we made the decision that this was not not contributing to the pieces authenticity and that was removed Nancy called at the end of a 50 year headache and I have to say it was one of the scarier aspects of the treatment because I really you know what the adhesives that was used what was it going to be reversible and and could we do this without damaging the surface and it was very exciting when it did come out and you can see it upstairs without the urna other x-rays we looked at joinery we can see dowels in here many many modern nails including a masonry screw here so some of that was addressed as well and the x-rays allowed us to reconstruct the how this sculpture was constructed it is solid wood block construction with the pieces joined with wooden dowels we looked carefully for any cavities or hollows where there may have been sutras or relics there was none it is solid wood lock and we have six main sections the torso the lap the legs and the arms all joined with wooden dowels and then smaller pieces joining on the hands a total of about 14 pieces that comprise with sculpture there's other parts that are missing now there would have been more drapery hanging down from both hands there would have been a larger crown at one time that's missing and there's other parts that have been added in more modern times looking at the top of the head this is a view of the top of the head of the sculpture and you can see the structure of the wood the center of the tree the piste right in the center of ahead and you can see the growth rings running consecutively around so this gives you a sense of how the sculpture is seated in in the tree from which it was carved and this was very useful but we also needed to be able to see the underside of the sculpture but since the surface is so delicate we knew we couldn't lift the sculpture up and laying it down so working with our conservation engineers we built a pallet here this is incorporated into the pedestal that you'll see upstairs you can't see it but we only had to move the sculpture one time onto this pallet and we were able to convert that into a cart for transporting it around the museum when we needed to into the display surface and it allowed me to work all around it and it has flats individual flats that the sculpture sits on that could be removed so here a slat son flats are removed and I'm working underneath the sculpture in order to take samples which we did for radiocarbon dating and for wood identification so the radiocarbon dating or C 14 gives the date when the tree was felled from which the sculpture was carved and it gave a very fairly narrow date range 1033 - 1155 current era so right in keeping with what we expected from the sculpture and that sample that work has done in New Zealand with a laboratory there that has worked on comparable sculpture so you can I could photograph the underside of the sculpture in sections and then make a mosaic so that we can virtually see the entire underside of the sculpture without laying it down and again here's the center of the tree on the seat here's another piece the center of the tree and there's about 20 growth rings so it's a very fast growing wood and this was identified by a specialist wood anatomist who's in Paris it's very international project we went all over the world to get our our help on this it is Colonia tomentosa it's called also called toe Empress or Polonia and this is an example of Colonia at the Arnold Arboretum if any of you visit their I live nearby if you go on like Sunday the lilacs are down here and you look up the hill and there's three or four colonia trees there so that was lovely to go find them I had a really great day going on a tree hunt and I love this particular of this particular Colonia trunk because it really you can just it just embodies kuan-yin and its solidity and it's straight make mitten straightness so it's a fast growing straight growing tree often used for sculpture and easy easy to carve so that covers the structure of the sculpture and I'll talk a little bit about the surface and some of the painted details and some of the discoveries that we made about that throughout the project so as we've talked about so the gilding was added later originally the flesh color would have been a pinkish whitish color this was probably done in the Ming Dynasty and one of the many redecoration xandrie dedications and there are at least three layers of gilding remaining on the sculpture now so it has that happened repeatedly but other areas do have their original coloration and a point talked specifically about the long red skirt that we see here this is a detail of the red skirt and it has a very special very particular design of lotus flowers and that would have covered the entire skirt and it's made with a very special technique of cuts gold leaf and I'll talk just walk through that quickly so you can appreciate it but these lines of gold these are the widest ones about one millimeter wide and the others you know even finer we do take samples to help understand what we're looking at and identify materials working with our research scientists we take cross sections but so just about the technique for a second this is a Japanese artist you are demonstrating this on our friend the Internet which we see multiple layers of gold leaf which are fused together on charcoal a bit of sand and charcoal so that you have some body to the gold and you can work with it and then cutting the gold into narrow strips using a bamboo knife and then you can lay it on to your decorative surface and this technique was developed in China in the 7th or 8th century but then it moved to Japan with Buddhism and it has become incredibly refined and it's known as Sakura Connie in Japanese that I have really not seen anything like this type of decoration on sculpture in China that I know of there are other examples of cure economy but they're generally more geometric than what we have ours is very special so I'm only going to show two cross sections so don't panic because I know sometimes they're hard to read but this is a very small sample of the paint that we have taken and embedded into a resin and polished so that we can see all of the different layers here is the the wood and then we have a clay ground layer and then a white preparatory layer of lead white and then the color is vermilion mercuric sulfide here and then the gold is on top very thin so we do we can see that this is the earliest painted decoration directly on the wood we also look at the samples of scanning electron microscopy and this is a very very interesting discovery is that instead of using multiple layers of gold leaf together as we saw in the Japanese example this we have tin metal underneath so in this case the gold was hammered on to tin to give it some structure and some body that would be a little less expensive perhaps give you a thicker structure to work with so here we can see that the vermilion brains looking very bright white because of the mercury and then tin which is folded over suggesting that it's hammered and the gold leaf on top of that so this is a very interesting discovery this is known in Europe as vish gold wouldn't gold is applied like this over silver or over tin I don't know of other examples of its use in China so every time we look at this the closer we look the more question we have here is examples of how this pattern might have looked on the back of the leg and on the front of the leg even more ornate with more fine fine fine details in the cure Akane very difficult to see now but you can imagine this bright red skirt with this overall Lotus pattern must have been quite spectacular the hem of the skirt down here was originally green we can see traces of green paint sort of about this color and this is also a manufactured pigment made from copper corrosion products and then some edging of gilding around the hem also original but other areas of the sculpture has many layers and I'm going to talk show a little bit I'm going to show a detail from this area of the drapery which appears red now so this is a photo micrograph of an area of paint loss not a sample but this is on the actual sculpture and here we can see the wood we can see there's green early the first paint decoration on the drapery and then we see a paper layer as enter an inter layer of paper then two distinct red decorations and then there are paper fibers on top as well and this is has been reported in other examples of Chinese sculpture where instead of the tradition is not to scrape off the paints the old paint before you redecorate it but to cover it with paper to provide a smooth and stable surface on which to do your next decorations and it's nice theory that this has added to the ongoing conservation problems and the ongoing problems that we have with the paint flaking off because we don't have good adhesion between all of the layers so that is a minus to the paper but the plus of course is that has preserved so much information for us to to learn from so just touching briefly on the treatment for the project paint was consolidated and where you see these white patches our areas where we've applied a special fish glue made from the swim bladders of sturgeon a very flexible adhesive that stain and penetrates well and then we cover that with tissue so it dries flat we're also removing plaster fills that had been applied in the 1950s remember when we played spot the difference and we saw that those joints had been filled we wanted to try to reveal those as much as possible as well and remove the over painting that was muddy and darkened over the past half-century so this is the lap before and after treatment during and after treatment and the laugh is also an area which is very complex and you can't see it very well in the gallery because it's quite high but there's many many different design schemes going on simultaneously and very hard to parse that out we did a lot of treatment of the gilding again removing modern materials bright patches that had been rebuilded and to try to uncover the earlier surfaces that had been applied in China and we did very minimal filling and in painting with our in painting we used we made up our own powder from 23 karat gold to match the surface and so these areas were integrated here and this is one of the many people who helped me on this project so this is a initial schematic of how guan yin might have looked early in its history you can see the pink colored flesh the red skirt the green hem and then also much of the jewelry that we see now has was added along when the sculpture was gilded at some time so this is more more austere or more refined there would be some more jewelry here and if you come back another time there is where there will be more information about this on the gallery the gallery guide that you can look at and look at the sculpture and go through how it might have looked at different periods and time so I hope you'll enjoy that so this is an example of a Sun dynasty painting of Quan Yin from dong Fong in China and again it's similar a similar palette the red skirt pinkish flesh and also ours would have had a larger Brown perhaps like this so that is one yen and I hope you will appreciate you know all of the transformations that it has that it is showing us and also moving forward with this project when Guan Yin was acquired in 1920 it came with two attendant figures such as nancy showed you earlier and moving forward will be bringing these out of storage they haven't been examined or treated in any way and trying to understand what relationship they may have had with wanyan if they're similar designs if they could have been from the same temple site for example so that that will be coming up as a project over the next little while and and we do I really want to thank the supports that we have had from the stockmen Family Foundation an anonymous gift the McCormick Family Foundation and and many other supporters of the MFA to carry this work out thank [Applause] and then search buttons for either of us Jazmin has a microphone this is a microphone here if you have a question please raise your hands and wait for the microphone to come whew I don't know very much for a very informative talk I have a question which I'm not sure you'll be able to answer but if you are I'd be very interested to hear it I wonder if you're familiar with the guang-ling in the Honolulu Academy of Art which is the signature piece of the entire museum it's extremely similar to the one that we have here and it's the same Song Dynasty and I believe it's from a similar location but I'm not sure about that would you have any information on that in a comparison between the two I know I know of it I've seen photographs of it unfortunately I have not had the opportunity to research in Honolulu with theirs there's a our colleagues it comes to the conservation colleagues and the curatorial colleagues have been very helpful in providing information about many of the comparative sculptures we have looked particularly at the piece at the Rijksmuseum the nelson-atkins museum the DNA is one at yale there's a small one at the Gardner Toronto we've been in touch with many many colleagues but and Seattle but not Honolulu and love to see it sometime hi thanks for the talk I have a quick question when I think is one of the first slides there is a sculpture of Quan Yin from circa 580 and when you were talking about Quan Yin coming from India you didn't mention the the transformation from male to female and that statue from 580 surprised me because it seemed from what I saw to look like female and I was wondering if if this one that we have in the museum and that one are both early examples of that trend I'll pull it up and while you're talking a couple of things one is I think it's important to remember that what we think of as magnetic villain and feminine might have been different in China at that time period so the 580 image is actually quite masculine and it wasn't until really the late song and the UN that that kuan-yin started to become more feminine in China image of my man the image of guanyin 2600 there I was trying to but it's not like cooperating so both both why why did the image become more and more feminine over the years in China first of all Guan Yin is kind of beyond gender also within the Guan Yin Sutra it explains that Guan Yin can transform his or her appearance in any way in order to be able to assist others to assist mortals for whatever they needed so that if Quan Yin needed to appear to look like a women woman then that transformation could take place in order to help other people and but so that's one reason for why why names start to become more feminine another reason is I think that guan yin in many ways started to take the place of other native Chinese fertility goddesses and became so often worshipped for the abilities of helping women to have children that it just became a more feminine appearing deity over time does that help answer the question if you look at images of blinding today there that are made today they're extremely feminine but but really in truth I mean we try to avoid pronouns because in a sense grainy is just really beyond gender and it's just a kind of temporal appearance that we see in the imagery old questions in this forehead what was that originally big presumably it was perhaps rock crystal but we don't we don't know what it there's some evidence of what it was and and I don't know of any of the wooden sculptures that are in western collections now that actually have a jewel in the urna at this time Wow rock crystal silica clear you admit the semi-precious stone you know crystals but it could have been anything we don't we don't know so probably better not to do I have anything because we did have our colleagues at MIT offered to make us a new one out of breakfast thank you I'm I'm very I was very interested by everything both of you had to say thank you very much among other things I'm trying to absorb this new way of thinking about authenticity I think coming into this lecture I assume that any curator would consider the original the authentic that needed to be uncovered and preserved and now correct me if I'm wrong but I'm taking up listening to you is that there's a whole different conception of authentic knowledge that treats a piece upon which many hands have worked as I'm sorry now go ahead as most authentically reflecting what all of those people with contributions is that what the definition of authenticity is in a case like this I'm just trying to get at that ah if we can avoid the word authenticity for the moment I mean target part of what what we're trying to capture is actually the history of an object through time because it has been experienced and worshiped by many people and seen by many people and changed by many people as kind of a living sculpture through time and our idea was to preserve it as it was when it was last worshipped so you wouldn't make sense yeah it's a great question and it's it's a it's something that as conservators we grapple with a lot what are we preserving how much we preserving why and often with pieces in this in this collection as an MFA it's a very old collection pieces have been here for 100 years 120 years or so late if they have their own history here as we see with this piece but it's I've also worked on other projects where we are going back to how the piece was when it was acquired and we're sort of using that as a at the time line because often you cannot go back to original especially if you're talking about antiquities it's one thing to say that for contemporary or more modern are at work but for antiquities you really can't I mean if you think you when we're looking at the Greek and Roman galleries we're not seeing the polychromy that's there is that authentic this is this is what the experiences that we have so we're trying to have things be stable and a presentation that is coherent and to do no harm and to under to appreciate that whatever we do needs to be reversible because the taste change and understandings change and goals change in concepts such as authenticity change I don't know if you've been to you new tongue that the house at Peabody Essex Museum which I also curated and we had to make a decision that was a house that was built in probably 1770s and inhabited for eight generations through to 1982 and we also had to make a decision were we going to bring it back to what it might have looked like but we didn't really know what it looked like when it was first built or were we going to preserve it as it was when it was last occupied and allow people to see all the changes that happened over time how doesn't radio carbon dating have a role in establishing the authenticity of these objects it's clear from the example you showed us that isn't this piece wasn't made 10 years ago in a Chinese sub shop right yes so this is powerful evidence that this is not rented yet it is an authentic piece and I think that the tree was was felled we have scientific evidence of when the tree was was felled to 95 percent certainty which is which is pretty good but then if we're looking at all of these different these different decoration layers what are we are we seeing are we seeing the 12th century then are we seeing in the twentieth century or something in between yes we did take a piece of wood yes yes we do have that yes for one more question thank you thank you very interesting talk I actually have two very quick questions number one I assume that they worked Quan Yin is to change characters do they have a meaning as separate characters which two characters guan yin oh yes I'm sorry one literally means to observe or be aware of Yin means sound and hear the sounds are implying the cries and the cries of the suffering and so guan yin is the one who hears the cries of sister the other question I had when you're subjecting the material to x-ray or carbon dating or ultraviolet light no danger to the material when you're doing that no there's no danger danger to the material when you subject it to x-ray now there's there's no danger to the the objects to expose it to x-rays the only danger with UV light is it at high energy light and it's causes fading at a faster rate but we it's very it's not any more than it has long-term exposure and the galleries here so no you know it is it is invasive to take samples the piece was pretty much Auto sampling we call it with the paint psyching samples systems there's plenty of samples to be had so and those are decisions that we make with the curators about whether to sample what to sample how much do you know that these sort of questions are collaborative thank you so much for sharing your knowledge and experience this plate thank you for joining us

Channel: Museum of Fine Arts, Boston

Views: 7,766

Rating: 4.9055119 out of 5

Keywords: chinese art, buddhist art, guanyin, art, museum, art history, conservation, song dynasty, asian art

Id: NRbJJfaCy6w

Length: 57min 41sec (3461 seconds)

Published: Tue Dec 27 2016