Cultural interpretation
After finishing graduate school, Fan took an internship at the Shanghai Museum. He went on to work in the art mounting office of the Department of Painting and Calligraphy at the National Palace Museum in Taipei and in the British Museum’s Hirayama Studio, which specializes in the conservation of Asian pictorial art. Fan says that his training in Shanghai resembled an apprenticeship and made him appreciate that zhuangbiao restoration is more than simply a craft, that a whole culture underlies its “clean, demount, repair, retouch” process. “Being a conservator means that you follow in the footsteps of the master with whom you trained.” To Fan, this makes zhuangbiao restoration not just a set of techniques, but the collective cultural memory of a group of people, one that the conservator is obliged to absorb and pass on.
Fan’s time at the British Museum provided him with a completely different view on conservation‡restoration. The people working there came from a variety of nations, cultures and fields, and offered opinions on restoration rooted in those different perspectives. There, he came to view conservation as not just a material restoration, but as a process that is also affected by how government cultural policies interpret cultural relics. Fan says that restoration is itself a kind of cultural interpretation, and as such doesn’t provide cut-and-dried answers. Managing a reasonable restoration involves discussion and debate on a variety of issues, including the objectives of the conservation project and the techniques available.
Fan believes that Taiwan’s painting and calligraphy restoration techniques are distinctive in the international arena, and hopes that his participation in conferences of global organizations such as the International Institute for the Conservation of Historic and Artistic Works (IIC) and the American Institute for Conservation of Historic and Artistic Works (AIC) will give Taiwan more of a voice in the international community. Here in Taiwan, he uses his SJ Art and Conservation business to bring museum-caliber restoration services to the general public and raise awareness of the value and significance of conservation and restoration.
While Fan would love to go back to making his own art, he argues that restoration requires its own kind of creativity. Every restoration project is unique, presenting challenges and undertaken for purposes that resist rote answers. Fan may no longer be a painter, but he and his fellow conservators have been transformed by the demands of their field into “action artists” who, through the process of restoration, forge works of “action art.”
Conservators spend their lives extending the lives of cultural relics.
Fan Ting-fu (center) and his staff at SJ Art and Conservation. (photo by Lin Min-hsuan)