AIC's 52nd Annual Meeting

Inpainting is a common technique used to compensate areas of loss in pictorial art. Over the years, methods of loss compensation have developed to include reversibility, greater respect for the remaining original elements, and allowing for distinction between original and inpainted passages.

Traditionally, for Eastern Asian paintings, "master mounters" carried out the entire conservation process. Throughout the centuries, they played the role of what we now call a "conservator." The process requires wet cleaning, removing old mountings, patching and infilling losses, inpainting, and remounting. Chinese master mounters have always considered inpainting the most critical process. Even today, concealing losses with perfect inpainting is their ultimate goal.

In Chinese paintings conservation, there are separate terms, one for connecting color and another for connecting lines; an approach that seeks to match the surviving areas as perfectly as possible. Consequently, imitative inpainting has always been considered to be the standard.

However, this practice of flawless, memetic inpainting presents two ethical issues: 1) when discoloration or inappropriate repairs occur, a full remounting is required to reverse the inpainting; and 2) it can be difficult even for conservators to distinguish between inpainted and original passages. Because remounting introduces water, often risking loss to original paint, it can be considered overly aggressive and incompatible with modern theories of conservation.

This paper will focus on a case study of remounting a rare 18th-century Chinese woodblock print and how to inpaint the areas of loss that can simultaneously follow the Chinese traditions and satisfy contemporary conservation ethics. The woodblock print depicts a scenic view of Yueyang Tower with the Eight Immortals gathering around Dongting Lake, having a majority of loss in the clouds and one of the central figures. The printed lines in the sky were relocated incorrectly; half of the figure's robe and body were missing and poorly inpainted. Adjusting the images and re-inpainting the losses were essential for this project. Losses in the figure required reinterpretation of the figure's robe and the body gesture. Several inpainting proposals were carefully considered with curator and colleagues in the Cleveland Museum of Art's conservation department.

Once the reconstruction of the figure's robe was decided, an inpainting method was designed to satisfy both the Chinese tradition and current conservation standards of reversibility. Rather than inpainting directly on the original paper surface or underlying mounting paper as typically done by Chinese masters, paper inserts were affixed within the losses and inpainted to connect and imitate printed lines and tones, making this approach fully reversible without remounting the entire artwork.

Furthermore, pigments used in the inpainting process were also selected to be detectible under ultraviolet induced visible fluorescence. This compensation approach is presented as a creative and practical option to the field of Chinese Paintings Conservation, bridging Chinese aesthetics with more current conservation standards.