Conservation of Ancient Minyak Art

As I wrote up their letters of employment, it seemed to me that Kham Aid's five new Expert Consultants had very exotic names indeed: Pajang Gurung, Tashi Angye Gurung, Tashi Gurung, Paima Angya Gurung, and Tsang Jhimi Gurung. Yet, when the five guys showed up in Kangding and I met them for the first time, both the names and faces seemed instantly familiar : Pasang, Tashi, Tashi, Pema, and their leader, nicknamed Jojo.   Really, they were Tibetan guys whose names had been filtered through Nepali ears. They had come a long way, but still they were Tibetans and they were at home.

Jojo and his colleagues are wall paintings conservation assistants, hired by Kham Aid to help rescue damaged wall paintings in Wayao Village. The five had started from their homes in Upper Mustang, a little bundle of Nepalese territory that pokes up into far western Tibet, trekked six days down the Kali Gandaki river to the Nepali town of Pokhara, ridden a bus for six hours to Kathmandu, boarded an airplane to Lhasa, continued to Chengdu, and then ridden in a bus to Kham. They carried freshly minted passports with Chinese visas stamped in them, hard-won Nepalese exit permissions, and invitation letters from Kham Aid Foundation bearing my signature.   Although the Tibetan world is culturally continuous from one end to the other, political boundaries still loom large. These Nepali Tibetans were, more than likely, the first Mustang people for generations ever to make a journey to this far eastern corner of the Tibetan plateau.

We had invited them because, between them, they have more than 35 years of experience working on sacred Tibetan Buddhist murals. Rescuing the wall paintings of Wayao would need many hands - skilled, sensitive, experienced hands. Sure, we would train local Minyak people some art conservation skills, but such workers cannot be created quickly, and not without careful individual tutoring. Our one expert conservator, Italian Luigi Fieni, would have his hands full to document the wall paintings, perform cleaning tests, and direct the overall approach. He could hardly oversee the eleven Minyak trainees, and with only a bare smattering of Tibetan he would have a harder time communicating with them. Moreover, it must be mentioned that Nepalis are a much more affordable workforce than Europeans.   Our five arrivals from Mustang would be more than just a heartwarming expression of pan-Himalayan friendship, they would be crucial to our Minyak wall paintings project.

As Kham Aid discovered last year with the help of our Winrock colleagues and local friends, Minyak is a treasure trove of centuries-old art and architecture. Our surveys have so far been cursory at best, but we have documented seven structures scattered around Minyak containing wall paintings whose ages appear to range from one to seven centuries. The highest concentration of such paintings is found in Wayao Village, which has two family chapels and one small monastery that house murals.

After traveling across Ganzi Prefecture for many years in fruitless search of paintings that pre-date the 1949 establishment of New China, to find so many in Minyak is truly extraordinary. We chose Wayao as a place to start because it is an excellent training ground for wall paintings students, and because it is a good candidate for tourism development activities undertaken jointly by Kham Aid and our partners under the Sustainable Tibetan Communities Program. Wayao also has buildings of considerable architectural significance, which I will write about in another report.

Our first day in Wayao found the team making a quick survey of the three buildings whose paintings our team would soon come to know intimately   We held a meeting with village elders to explain what we would be doing, and to introduce the team. We told them: tomorrow we will be selecting wall paintings conservation trainees from among the young people in your village. They will have six weeks of work and they will be paid well, but we expect them to work hard and show total commitment to our program.

Chief wall paintings conservator Luigi Fieni takes a break with Tsang Jhimi "Jojo" (right), leader of the Mustang team.

Candidates work on their test papers.

Jojo supervises the work of two students.

Students and leading villagers hear a lecture by John Sanday on the work done on Thubchen Monastery in Nepal.

Team photo. In the back line are the five Nepalese conservators wearing yellow shirts, with Pam Logan (left), and Kham Aid program assistant Dechen Drolma (red hat). In the front two lines are the eleven trainees with John Sanday (brown hat), and Luigi Fieni (right).

Indicating Tsang Jhimi, the 22-year-old Mustang team leader who looks so much like a Minyakpa he could easily pass for the son of some of those present, I told the villagers, "Jojo was once exactly like you. He was a farmer. He was chosen to learn wall paintings conservation by some foreigners working at Thubchen Monastery in Mustang. He has been doing that work for eight years now, and has become so good at it that he was invited to come here and help you with your murals. We want the same future for some of your bright young people. We plan to expand our program beyond Wayao, beyond Minyak, to other places where there are murals worthy of conservation. When we do that, I want to take some Wayao people with us."

There is nothing like a role model to get people fired up, and Jojo, quiet and modest though he is, did the trick for the Wayao elders. With increasing excitement, they began tossing out names of sons and nephews and friends who would be sent to take the test we would hold the next day. We asked, what about girls? At first the idea of girls working on wall paintings was strange for them - religious painting in Tibet is, after all, normally a man's province - but under our encouragement many girls' names were added to our list as well. Tomorrow, we told them, the candidates should come to the monastery at 9am.

In the monastery courtyard the next morning we were pleased to see nearly twenty eager applicants. Luigi Fieni and Jojo made up twenty test sheets: paper with rectangles and irregular blobs drawn on them. Before a mob of very interested onlookers, they showed what was expected of test-takers: to fill in the rectangles with closely-spaced even parallel lines made with a paintbrush, to match colors (thus demonstrating that they were free of color blindness), and to precisely fill in a random shape with paint. What made the test a little challenging was that the test sheets were pinned up on vertical surfaces. This was intentional: the test sheets were standing in for wall paintings.

To pick up a finely pointed paintbrush, to mix color and water and dab off the excess paint, then to hold one's hand steady to make a long, even, unwavering, precisely positioned line of paint, line after line, at uncomfortable angles - this is harder than it looks, especially for beginners. Some of the test papers were, in a word, lousy. Pema Penlo, one of the elders, proclaimed, "The test is so easy but they're doing so badly! I'm itching to get my hands on a brush!"

When the test was complete, Luigi and Jojo gathered up the papers and, after lunch, considered them. A few papers were obviously excellent, for example the one made by Barzhou, a slip of a girl and at 14 the youngest applicant ? and she could easily have passed for twelve. Another standout was Pentsok, a gangly lad who, at 6?3? is the tallest Khampa I?ve ever seen. There were a number of pretty good ones. We were pleased ? and relieved ? that some children of influential villagers made the cut, notably Amee, the Party Secretary?s son-in-law. Altogether, we would be able to compose a fine trainee team.

Even though nobody in Wayao really knew what art conservation was, involvement in our project had by now acquired quite a gleam of prestige. When we announced our selections, it was clear that the new trainees had instantly acquired great face. In following days several late-covers came to us begging to be included. Based on their test results, we took some and declined others, and the result was a freshman class of seven men, four women. And they were very excited!

In the afternoon, the trainees received their first lesson: how to "consolidate" wall paintings. As Luigi explained, when a building is made, the walls are layered with several renders composed of different substances - stone, rough clay, fine clay, lime - the last of which bears the actual painting. As time passes, the layers have a tendency to separate, leaving voids in the wall, which, if left unfilled, will eventually cause chunks of mural to come loose and fall off. You can find the voids by tapping gently on the wall and listening to the sound; a high pitch means a void near the surface; a lower pitch means that the void is deep.

Consolidation means filling the voids with something that will keep the wall hanging together, usually a mixture of glue and very fine liquid clay. The work is painstaking: hunting over the surface of the mural to find the voids, carefully drilling small holes to just the right depth, then using a syringe to inject filler beneath the surface of the painting. The paintings in Wayao, especially in the monastery, were riddled with voids and a great deal of work would be needed to fill them before any further work could take place.

With one chief conservator (Luigi) and five experienced assistants (the Mustang team), the trainees were taught the required skills in fairly short order. Each Nepali had two or three trainees to supervise, and the team quickly fanned out over first and second floors of the monastery. Meanwhile, some trainees were assigned the job of grinding, sieving, and mixing clay. While our generator thrummed away in the courtyard, some carpenters worked out back to bang together some scaffolding, and villagers were constantly coming in to see what we were doing. The monastery was a beehive of activity.

Old Kham Aid hands like Wu Bangfu are completely accustomed to a babble of languages being spoken at our field sites, usually Tibetan, Chinese, and English. Now to this mix we added three new ones: Nepali (used by John Sanday, our conservation architect, to talk to the Mustang team), Mustang's own language (which sounded like nothing I'd ever heard before), and Lhoka, a far-western dialect of Tibetan. But what I was on pins and needles to find out was: would our Minyak students be able to communicate with their Nepali mentors?

The answer was soon revealed: yes, they could! It's true, their mutual vocabulary was not large, but they could talk to each other. And, luckily enough, one of our trainees had lived in Lhasa for nine years and had been exposed to Lhoka which he could therefore understand. By the end of the first day, the wall paintings team needed no translators. They were a smoothly functioning - and very happy - unit.

Coming soon: Part II: Mystery Murals Revealed