Buddhist Silk Painting

Conservation began, as always, with photographic documentation and a detailed condition report. A loose fibre was studied under the microscope at 40× and identified as silk chiffon — a transparent, almost weightless weave of alternating S- and Z-twist crepe yarn, still carrying traces of an old adhesive.

The painting was extraordinarily damaged: fragmentary, faded, stained, and losing adhesion to its backing in many places. Cleaning began dry, then progressed to closely-controlled solvent tests before any aqueous work. Waviness was relaxed with measured moisture, and two holes at the centre were filled by the paper-pulp method — fine tissue fibres bound with adhesive, burnished, and dried under pressure.

A water stain was reduced with an ethanol–water mixture at 20:80 — the ratio that tested best — and the tears and cuts on the reverse were mended by patch and strip lining, both to strengthen the work and to keep insects from entering through the losses. What had survived only in fragments was, at last, stable.