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Conservation of Ancient Minyak Art

Part II: Preservation of Wayao's Buddhist wall paintings

by Luigi Fieni (with editing by Karin Tang)

January, 2007

§    Minyak’s rare and beautiful wall paintings vandalized and covered in centuries of soot and grime

§    International and regional experts team up with local trainees to rescue the paintings

§    Cleaning and consolidation techniques used.

The villagers of Wayao were chosen by fate to be caretakers of rare and beautiful Tibetan wall paintings, some of which are hundreds of years old. For all their lives they have been living with Buddha images marred by dirt and damage, but undoing the damage wrought by time and political turmoil is a sophisticated and technical task beyond their ability.    So Kham Aid asked me to work with the villagers to train them in the science of conserving their fragile and precious art.

Between October and December 2006, I and my team of five wall paintings conservation assistants from Mustang, Nepal worked with 11 local trainees to rescue the damaged wall paintings of Wayao Village in the Minyak region of Kham. Our activities took place in two privately-owned chapels and the village’s small Buddhist temple, Kyi Lhakhang. The Mustang team, known to me through my work on Thubchen and Jampa Monasteries, brought to the task 35 years of combined experience working on sacred Tibetan Buddhist murals. They closely supervised the Wayao apprentices, providing one-to-one training in cleaning techniques. The trainees all showed a keen interest in the work, and are looking forward to deepening their skills and learning more about conservation.

The wall paintings, located in Kyi Lhakhang and the chapels of two local homes, were all in a very poor state of preservation. Under my direction, the Mustang team and the trainees succeeded in completing about half of the work required to remove layers of soot, grime, old varnish and clay, and to fix loose layers of paint back to the wall.

Kyi Lhakhang consists of two storeys, both painted. The quality of the wall paintings varies remarkably between the first and the second floor. On the first floor, the paint layer was much rougher and the style of painting appears more recent, with a certain amount of damage to the pictorial cycle. Many parts were in danger of falling off, and many damaged divinities had been painted over by local artists to allow the local community to continue to worship. Enamel paint from the architraves had dropped onto the wall paintings, and dust and cobwebs covered the whole surface.

The condition of the paintings on the second floor was markedly worse, having been subject to vandalism. The paint layer had come away from the stone wall and had been varnished over in an effort to protect it. With age, the varnish had turned brown, obscuring the paintings. On top of that, Chinese and Tibetan writing had been painted in a deep red and covered in a thick coating of mud, in some cases more than 3mm deep. Everything in the room was covered in black soot and grime ­ villagers told us that this storey has been used as a kitchen for a long time. The local community had tried to clean the coating of mud and the black soot as best they could, but unfortunately this meant that the paint layer was quite damaged as the use of water had washed away a large section of the lower wall paintings.

The wooden ceiling on the second floor was in rather better condition. The ceiling is composed of a series of interlocked wooden painted panels. Most had been overpainted in 2004, and only three were untouched. After some cleaning, however, we found that all the overpainted panels had original paintings preserved underneath. Although all of them were heavily darkened from the application of a very old varnish and a thick deposit of soot, the paint layer, after cleaning, looked in good condition.

 

I directed conservation activities in two chapels in the homes of Mr Gelek, and Mr Dendrup in Wayao, and performed cleaning tests on the paintings in a third private home in another village, old Sade. The Gelek chapel is on the third floor of the house, with the pictorial cycle painted directly onto a wooden partition on the north side. Here, leaking water has partly washed away some of the paint layer. On the west and south wall the paintings are on a thin layer of clay of varying thickness. In places, the clay has become detached from the wall. There is a wooden altar with carved and painted panels and cupboards, and a painted architrave and pillars. All of these were covered in a darkened varnish, but the paint was still scratched and damaged. The ceiling is composed of interlocked and painted wooden panels, with its main images covered by a thin coating of clay.
 

The Dendrup chapel is also on the third floor, with paintings on all but one wall where there is a wooden altar. The entrance, consisting of a wooden partition wall, is painted, as are the interlocking panels of the wooden ceiling. The paintings were in an extremely poor condition, and we estimated that more than half of them were irreparably damaged. Rough, amateur efforts to clean the paintings had resulted in great loss of the paint layer. The remaining paintings were covered with a thin coating of clay, but were only loosely attached to the wall and many pieces had fallen off. The wood had been darkened by soot deposits.

The chapel at Old Sade, where I performed cleaning tests, is very old, and the painting is of a rare beauty and quality. Very few examples of similar value remain in the whole of Kham. The team surveyed the state of preservation of the wall paintings, but did not carry out any large-scale conservation activities. The condition of these paintings is critical, and restoration work needs to be planned as soon as funds are available.

A number of different techniques were used on the paintings in Wayao. Where the paint layer was coming away from the wall, it was possible to fix it by injecting mortar made of local clay and glue solution through existing cracks where possible, or into small holes that we drilled.  Sometimes, however, this consolidation could not be done until the paintings were clean enough that outlines of the figures were visible and it was certain that the drilling would not damage important figures or inscriptions

Wall of Gelek Chapel before and after cleaning.

Where the walls were covered in mud, this first had to be removed. At Gelek chapel it was possible to do this using toothbrushes and very fine iron wool. At Kyi Lhakhang, surgical knives and sharpened spatulas were used, and the mud was made easier to remove by applying compresses of cotton soaked in a solution of water and alcohol for four hours. After the removal of the compress, the team had to wait a further hour before work could begin to allow the paint layer to dry sufficiently to prevent it from being damaged as the mud was removed.

Although paints used in Tibet are traditionally water-based and soluble in water, they lose most of their solubility with ageing. Thus it was possible to use water-based chemicals to remove varnish with cotton swabs. The paintings were first covered in tissue paper to avoid accidental damage by the cotton swabs, and after cleaning tissue paper was again applied to remove any salt that may have remained on the paintings from the water. Similarly, the over-painting on the wooden ceilings was removed with a water-based chemical, and the darkened varnish, soot and grime were removed using cotton swabs dipped in a solvent.

By the time the mission was completed, the team had mostly completed the consolidation work at the sites of Kyi Lhakhang and the Gelek and Dendrup chapels. Although the team was only able to clean one wall at Kyi Lhakhang of the altered varnish, most of the clay and soot was successfully removed. The next campaign will start in September, when my team will return to Wayao to complete the cleaning and start the next phase of the conservation work.

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Luigi Fieni is a consultant to Kham Aid Foundation.  For more information about him, see www.luigifieni.com.