Postponement of the Exhibition: “The Appeal of Japanese Art: Japanese Works of Art Restored Overseas” and Launch of the Special Website
Tokyo National Research Institute for Cultural Properties (TOBUNKEN) has carried out the Cooperative Program for the Conservation of Japanese Art Objects Overseas since 1990. To date, it has conserved 385 pieces of paintings and crafts owned by art museums in many parts of the world, including Europe, North America, and Australia. According to the initial plan, the conserved works of art in this program were supposed to return home in fiscal 2020 and an exhibition was due to be organized, wherein restoration techniques, materials, and tools would also have been presented; we had accordingly made preparations. In order to prevent the spread of the novel coronavirus infectious disease (COVID-19), however, we decided to postpone the exhibition.
Instead, we have recently launched a special website as something we can do even under constraints on the moves of people and goods. On this website, we introduce works of Japanese arts and crafts that we planned to exhibit, museums that own them in Europe and the U.S., and a list of works that have been conserved in searchable database format. As for those of which reports have already been published, you can read the text online as well. Further, there are a wide variety of traditional materials necessary to restore cultural properties. Moreover, a video is posted to explain, among others, Uda paper, which is used for the final and the backmost lining of a hanging scroll and a paper to be used to repair or restore the honshi (the paper on which a painting or calligraphy is drawn). These are designated as the national selected preservation technique for cultural properties. This video allows you to understand that various kinds of wisdom and ingenuity are brought together to hand down traditional techniques from generation to generation and conserve cultural properties amid Japanese traditional culture and natural environment. Let us take this opportunity to encourage you to visit the site. For your information, the preparations for the exhibition and production of the website were carried out as part of the Japan Cultural Expo.
https://www.tobunken.go.jp/exhibition/202103/