Ton Wilmering, Senior Program Officer at the Getty Foundation, spoke about the the World Monument Fund’s new conservation training program it has developed at the Forbidden City in Beijing, China as part of its collaborative conservation program for the Qianlong Gardens in the Forbidden City. The gardens, a series of 27 pavillions and courtyards built by the Qianlong Emperor between 1771 and 1776 within the Forbidden City are an extraordinary example of Qian Dynasty decorative arts, and reflect the emperor’s broad cultural tastes and knowledge. I had the privilege of seeing the traveling exhibition of furniture and other objects from the Qianlong Gardens at the Peabody Essex Museum in Salem, MA in 2010, and the furniture and interiors on view were beautiful, exhibiting incredible craftsmanship.
The World Monument Fund is focused on funding projects with capacity-building components, and in conjunction with their conservation program in the Qianlong Gardens, in 2009 they established an new training program in the Forbidden City known as Conservation Resources for Architectural Interiors/Furniture and Training, or CRAFT. The program is designed to provide on-the-job training in both traditional craft practices and modern conservation techniques and science. Participants were selected from among current staff members of the Forbidden City complex, and include carpenters, collections care specialists, curators, architects and scientists. Current craft practitioners in China often have little knowledge of past techniques or history, and the program was designed to introduce them to craft history using historic Chinese cabinet making manuals. The program focuses on critical thinking as well as hand skills, and areas of study include scientific principles, history of conservation ethics, worker safety, drawing and drafting using both traditional and CAD techniques, materials technology, tool making, and joinery.
The program has made efforts to include Chinese faculty wherever possible, and Chinese wood species specialists and organic and inorganic chemists have taught in the program. The WMF found that many of the resources and people needed in the program were available in Beijing (in fact lots of conservation literature has been translated into Mandarin), but the WMF needed to make the connections with local libraries and scientists to bring them into the project. Other participants in the training program have included Susan Buck (cross-section analysis), and Chris McGlinchey (adhesives), and Behrooz Salimnejad (gilding) among others, as well as Ton, Rick Kershner and Greg Landrey, who the WMF brought in initially to design a space for the program and develop the curriculum.
Ton pointed out that the furniture on view in the traveling exhibition from the Qianlong Gardens which came to the US had not been worked on by participants in the CRAFT program. Instead, the Forbidden City bureaucracy had contracted out the restoration of that furniture, and it often involved practices that conflicted with modern conservation ethics. I was interested in the cultural differences exhibited by the Chinese participants. Ton told how the students all liked to work together on a project, showing a picture of four students sitting around a table, cleaning it with swabs together.
Ton also talked about the difficulties the program has experienced. Because the participants are employees working in the Forbidden City (remember, the program is on-the-job training), they are frequently called away to their regular jobs, which can be disruptive. Continuous supervision of the program by a trained conservator has also bee difficult. Many of the original participants have had to – or have chosen to – drop out, and currently about half the original class are still participating. Interestingly, it is the carpenters and architects who have stayed, not the collections care specialists.
After talking about the CRAFT program, Ton briefly discussed another initiative the Getty Foundation is involved in, to facilitate the transfer (and retention) of skills and knowledge in the structural conservation of panel paintings. Many of the most skilled practitioners in the conservation of these wooden panels are approaching retirement age, and the Getty Foundation has begun a 6 year initiative to set up apprenticeships with these practitioners for post-graduate, mid-career and senior conservators of wooden artifacts. The program is designed to have a broad geographic distribution, to include participants in Eastern and Western Europe, as well as the US and UK, presumably.