Parable of the Illusory City
There are several aims of replication (Jie, 114). The first is the preservation of wall paintings; duplicating the fragile wall paintings is a way to extend the life of the paintings. Another reason is the study and transmission of art, as copying is a traditional educational method of students of Chinese painting. Additionally, replication assists research. Copyists analyze images and create dialogues with the original art by reconstructing wall paintings. Lastly, there is the reason of exhibition: with replicas, the Mogao cave art can be shown to the world.
It was perhaps with these aims in mind that James Lo and Lucy Lo took photographs of the Mogao cave art in the 1950s, which in turn inspired their younger artist friends in Taiwan (Seattle Art Museum). Together, they used projections of the Lo’s black and white photos of the Mogao wall and Lucy’s notes on position and color to reproduce Landscape: Parable of the Illusory City from the Lotus Sutra.
This particular painting is based on the mural found on the main chamber’s south wall to the left of the niche in Mogao Cave 217. This cave was constructed in the Jinglong era as a family temple (e-Dunhuang). While the murals on the bottom of the wall show much wear, the part of the mural that the Lo’s replicated is relatively intact.
The Lo’s painting is a careful replication of the cave art in terms of placement of the objects and people. Just like in Cave 217, this landscape is filled with high mountains in the back and hills in the middle and front of the painting. There are four large red banners, three in the back and one in the front left of the painting. On the right hand side is a temple, and throughout the landscape, there are men and horses.
While the painting is a strikingly accurate replica of the location of the various objects, the colors shown in the painting are not exactly identical to those found in photographs of Cave 217. While the mountains on the actual wall are painted in a bluish green, the mountains in the replication are much bluer, with no green easily seen. The banners in the cave are much more desaturated in color than those in the Lo’s copy. The colors of the figures in the Lo’s painting are brighter than those found on the cave, and overall the Lo’s painting has a yellowish background, while the cave’s background is whiter.
The painted replication of the Parable of Illusory City from the Lotus Sutra appears to be a current state replication or a restoration replication (Jie, 115). Current state replication seeks to replicate the wall painting as it currently exists, and is typically used for exhibitions and is the one being used by the Dunhuang Academy. Restoration replication seeks to scientifically reproduce what the art originally looked like, and is primarily used for research and exhibition.
The meticulous way that the Lo’s copied the mural--projecting photographs to create the most accurate image possible--attests to the thought process that this mural is a current state replication. In addition, they could have used Lucy’s notes on the colours present in the cave from when she saw the mural to try and replicate the painting as it existed, creating a current state replication based on the black-and-white photos that they had.
There can also be an argument for the replicated painting to be a restoration replication. If the Lo’s were trying to capture the current state of the wall painting, they could have taken color photos of the cave, capturing the cave’s actual paint colors.The colours present in the replication are not identical to that of the cave’s actual art; this could be because the Lo’s were trying to do what cameras could not do in replications--to show the colours as they existed before time caused the pigments to fade.
However, the rest of the wall that the landscape was copied from can cast some doubt on this replication being a restoration replication. On the actual cave, in the center of the south wall is an image of a Buddha cloaked in a bright red cloth, a red close to the color that the Lo’s used in the banners in the replication painting. However, the actual color of the banner in recent high quality pictures of the cave is much grayer than the red used on Buddha’s clothes. If this were a restoration replication, Lucy’s notes could have indicated that red pigments present in the wall painting didn’t actually fade that much over time, and thus they would have realised that the banners were not a faded red, but a different colour entirely.
Instead, this could be a current state replication where the colours do not exactly match the recent pictures of the cave due to Lucy’s notes. The photographs were in black and white, so the Lo’s and their artist friends did not have an exact reference of the actual wall painting. Thus, they were relying on written descriptions of the paint pigments, so the discrepancy in the colours can be due to the actual colours not being communicated exactly via Lucy’s notes.
-Joyce Jang