As much as eastern and western art differ in style and appearance, even greater contrasts lie beneath the surface. Materials, media, techniques, and even the context in which Asian art is shown are quite different from European-American art. The painting tradition that originated in China and spread to Japan and Korea employs water-based paints and inks on paper or silk. Imagery is stylized and often represents specific occasions: seasons, holidays, rituals and celebrations. Formats are portable and adaptable: scrolls and screens that can be rolled or folded and stored when not on view. Traditional Japanese buildings had wall panels called fusuma that slid on tracks, so that the rooms they defined could be reconfigured at will.
Maintaining East Asian paintings is an ongoing process. Scroll paintings are mounted on papers and fabrics that break down with age and use. The wood framing and paper backing inside screens and wall panels are stressed by repeated movement. These materials, and the water-based media applied to them, are more vulnerable to light than the oil paints and canvas used in western painting. Conservation is painstaking and expensive and poses its own risks to valuable works of art.
When Asian paintings began to enter American collections in the 19th century, museums and collectors confronted these particular demands. Maintenance cycles can be decades or centuries, depending on how carefully and how often paintings are shown and stored. A few large East Coast museums with significant Asian collections brought in experts from Asia to staff their own conservation studios. Others, including the Seattle Art Museum (SAM), shipped artworks to Japan, to be worked on there.
Asian art formed the core of SAM’s holdings at its founding and remains one of its most important collections. When the renovation of the historic building housing the Seattle Asian Art Museum (SAAM) was completed in 2020, it included the first dedicated Asian paintings conservation studio in a museum west of the Mississippi.
The Tateuchi Conservation Center is intended to serve the Seattle Asian Art Museum collection as well as museums and collectors throughout the western U.S. It is headed by Tanya Uyeda, one of a handful of master conservators of East Asian paintings in this country.
Uyeda was born and educated in the U.S., earned a bachelor’s degree in Japanese language and history, and had started graduate studies in Japanese literature in Japan when she had a change of heart. Volunteering as a Japanese language interpreter at the Freer Gallery, the Smithsonian’s Museum of Asian Art in Washington DC, introduced her to the field of art conservation. She returned to Japan, earning a master’s degree in Preservation of Cultural Properties while doing a traditional apprenticeship at an elite painting conservation studio in Tokyo.
Returning to the U.S., she entered the field at a high level, joining the Museum of Fine Arts Boston, home to the oldest and finest collection of Japanese art outside of Japan. She spent 20 years there, entrusted with the care of masterworks from their collection, before coming to Seattle to inaugurate the Tateuchi Center in 2023.
Remounting a painting on a scroll or screen is not a matter of simply reproducing the old mounting. Each artwork has a history and it may be complicated.
Uyeda said she considers “everything from cultural authenticity to replication of colors, and cost…. Materials [are] inherently very expensive and also increasingly harder to obtain. There are fewer weavers in China, Japan, and Korea making traditional textiles of any kind.”
Chinese and Korean paintings may have spent time in Japanese collections before being brought to the U.S. Previous owners have imposed their own taste in remounting works in their possession.
“We have had so many Korean works that have obviously gone through Japanese hands, and they bear those marks literally on the works,” Uyeda said. “They’ve been radically impacted for better, for worse. That’s part of the history.”
Because light slowly deteriorates the paintings, they are only shown for a few months at a time between years-long stints in storage. Curators rotate and evaluate the collection on a regular cycle, in addition to organizing special exhibitions. Uyeda chose to work in museums rather than private conservation studios because she values the opportunity to collaborate with curators in addressing these issues.
“If you can work with a curator who has an open mind… who is willing to go on that journey with you, there’s nothing to replace a true art historian’s connoisseur‘s eye,” she stated. “They’ve often seen many more paintings than I have in the course of their work, especially if it’s within the realm of their specialty… I need that knowledge, that aesthetic sense.”
The largest project currently underway in the Tateuchi Center is the remounting of a set of four 17th century fusuma titled The Four Accomplishments. They were painted for a feudal lord’s shrine, an opulent environment where the walls were moveable murals. Some panels had paintings on both sides.
SAM’s paintings were once back-to-back with a set of four paintings now in the British Museum; they were separated and re-mounted in the 1930’s before being sold to the two museums. They will be reunited, along with another recently discovered set of paintings from the same site, and tour to two museums in Japan next summer. Uyeda and her staff of two interns are remounting the paintings to withstand the stress of shipping and to look their best in this prestigious exhibition. Remounting is also a chance to examine the backs of the paintings and their previous mountings for clues to their history.
The Atsuhiko and Ina Goodwin Tateuchi Conservation Center is on the lower level of the Seattle Asian Art Museum in Volunteer Park. It is not open to the public, but its glass doors allow visitors a glimpse of work in progress.
For info, visit seattleartmuseum.org/art-and-artists/conservation.
Photo: Susan Kunimatsu
