A Study Of Conservation Treatment Method Of Chinese Mural Painting At Traditional Temple

The lexical meaning of Mural painting is a style of paintings drawn on the wall, ceiling, pillar of a natural or artificial building such as cave, tomb, palace, temple, and church, and mural painting is different in nature from other styles of paintings in that it is organically connected with the building. In addition, the spatial balance of the building can change depending on how to treat the color, composition, and themes of the mural painting. In this sense, mural painting has been created and developed in close relation with building in both western and eastern cultures, and thus is a three-dimensional painting style to be expressed in various ways according to western vs. eastern, periods, techniques or the character, religion, incantation, commemoration, amusement, and artistic purpose of the building.This type of painting has started at the earliest age among arts as a basic means to stimulate human instinct, and the typical examples of this are the prehistoric cave paintings such as Lascaux cave painting in France and Altamira cave painting in Spain, which is the reason to regard mural painting as the origin of painting. Chinese and Korean mural paintings are classified into temple (stone cave) mural painting, palace mural painting, burial chamber mural painting, and so on, among which temple mural painting to reflect Buddhist culture is the core mural painting.As various religions prevailed around the era of Christ, the places for asceticism and prayer were arranged, and Buddhist art developed from the motive to decorate the places. Among them, mural painting played the roles of enlightenment, worship, and solemnity as an important means to solemnize the wall of temples. The roles of mural painting in Buddhism can be found in a great deal of currently existing literature, the typical examples of which are the western Christian cathedral, the eastern Buddhist temple and Taoism preaching court.Thus, mural painting takes an important position as a requirement for building construction and as an art to reflect religious idea and aesthetic elements in both western and eastern culture. However, the temple (Buddhist temple and Taoism preaching court) mural painting in East-Asia is very closely related with the condition or life of the building in terms of its life and has the fatal weaknesses that it gets also impaired when the foundation wall is impaired, and that it also comes to be destructed when the building is destructed by fire or others. Furthermore it is not easy to move the mural painting to other place for conservation unlike other cultural properties, and when detached from the building, it loses its nature as mural painting.This article includes three major topics. The first topic is to organize the history and contents of Chinese and Korean temple mural painting through various articles, academic papers and reports of art history and conservation-related studies. The second is to suggest the importance of cultural property management by dealing with conservation science approach to conservation treatment and the stream and theories of contemporary conservation philosophy. In addition, the Korean conservation cases are summarized focusing on the Muwi Temple in Gangjin, Korea designated as 13th of national treasure and 1313th of cultural treasure. Finally, this article analyzes the conservation process and techniques, the impairment causes of temple mural painting and its conservation method, and problems in conservation through the data collectedfrom repair field of Korean cultural and conservation treatment field of templemural painting.The ultimate objective of this article is to search for the conservation method of temple mural painting as mentioned earlier. For correct conservation method to be sought, various academic areas such as eastern culture, history, philosophy, religion, art, traditional technology, and natural science should be in liaison, and an mutually organic system is highly in need. Under the situation in which only a few of conservation studies of traditional mural painting in Ease-Asia has been conducted, especially conservation studies of Chinese temple mural painting have never been conducted, I hope this article can be a foundation study for more advanced conservation studies of Chinese temple mural painting in the future, and the temple mural paintings can be passed intact to our next generation through correct conservation of them.Finally, current Chinese society should make an effort to conserve cultural properties and recognize it as a task for the society to accomplish. That is, it should make an effort to develop new materials for conservation treatment appropriate for current state, to establish measures to conserve the impaired cultural properties through the recognition of their historical and aesthetical value, to study the method to conserve them as close as the original, to find out administrative/structural way to financially support such studies, to develop systematic educational system to raise conservation professionals, and to set up the long-term activities such as academic exchange within and outside China.