Exhibition on cave temples of Dunhuang

"Cave Temples of Dunhuang: Buddhist Art on China's Silk Road"
Getty Center
Los Angeles
May 7 - September 4, 2016

Organized by the Getty Conservation Institute (GCI), the Getty
Research Institute (GRI), the Dunhuang Academy, and the Dunhuang
Foundation, the exhibition commemorates over 25 years of
collaboration between the GCI and the Dunhuang Academy.

Presenting Sponsor: The Robert H.N. Ho Family Foundation

In May 2016, the Getty will present a major exhibition on the
spectacular Buddhist cave temples located near Dunhuang, an oasis in
Northwest China on the ancient Silk Road.  Visitors will immerse
themselves in the art and history of the Mogao Grottoes, an
extensive cave temple complex and UNESCO World Heritage site, which
thrived as a Buddhist center from the 4th to the 14th centuries.

   "This major exhibition, unprecedented in scope, is the first in
    North America to fully explore the art, environment, and
    conservation of the Buddhist cave temples of Dunhuang.  The
    Mogao site, located on the edge of the Gobi Desert, is a
    testament to a thousand years of religious, commercial, and
    cultural exchange along the trade routes linking East and West,
    collectively known as the Silk Road," says James Cuno, president
    and CEO of the J. Paul Getty Trust.  "The exhibition highlights
    the Getty's long relationship with the Dunhuang Academy,
    stewards of the site, as well as our ongoing efforts to preserve
    the world's cultural heritage."

Exploring the history of the cave temple site from its founding in
the 4th century, to its abandonment in the 14th century, to its
revitalization in the 20th century, the exhibition will offer three
complementary experiences.  A temporary building on the Getty's
plaza will house three full-scale, hand-painted replica caves,
filled with exquisite Buddhist painting and sculpture.

The Getty Research Institute galleries will exhibit over forty
objects discovered at Mogao in 1900 in Cave 17, known as the
"Library Cave." Rarely if ever seen in the United States, these
stunning works reflect the diverse ideas, beliefs, and artistic
styles of China and the Silk Road in the 8th, 9th and 10th
centuries.  The art displays the co-mingling of major cultures-Greek
and Roman via Ghandaran India, Middle Eastern and Persian, Indian
and Chinese.

A multimedia experience will comprise the third part of the
exhibition.  New 3D stereoscopic immersive technology, never before
used in a museum exhibition, will enable visitors to examine in
detail the magnificent sculpture and painting of Cave 45.  This
8th-century cave exemplifies the artistic brilliance of Chinese art
of the High Tang period (705-781).

The exhibition will also focus on the modern history of the Mogao
cave temples at Dunhuang, highlighting the Getty Conservation
Institute's work in partnership with the Dunhuang Academy to address
the preservation challenges of this singular site.

Cave Temple Conservation

Over a thousand-year period, the cave temples at Mogao were
hand-carved into a cliff face of alluvial conglomerate rock.  The
walls were plastered with a mixture of clay collected from the local
riverbed, sand, and plant fiber, and decorated with extraordinary
wall paintings that depict Buddhist religious imagery, as well as
scenes of everyday life.  For centuries, the site has endured in a
stark desert environment that still threatens to damage or destroy
the wall paintings and sculpture.

Since 1989, the Getty Conservation Institute has worked with the
Dunhuang Academy on the conservation and management of the site,
with the first years of collaboration focusing on research and site
stabilization.  Since 1997, work has focused on the development of a
site master plan, conservation of wall paintings, training, and
visitor management.  The collaboration has included a model project
in Cave 85, a large and beautifully decorated ninth-century cave
temple.  The project determined causes and mechanisms of wall
paintings deterioration and developed conservation solutions
adaptable to other cave temples at the site, as well as at other
Silk Road locations.

"The extent of wall paintings at the site is equivalent to a wall 15
feet high and 6 miles long, an enormous and complex conservation
project to undertake," says Neville Agnew, senior principal project
specialist at the Getty Conservation Institute.  "The scale of the
site led to an approach that favors preventive conservation, and the
Dunhuang Academy has taken care to manage several factors of
deterioration, including controlling the number of visitors to the
site to prevent damage from humidity and physical contact with the
paintings."

The exhibition in the Getty Research Institute galleries will
include 43 manuscripts, paintings on silk, embroideries, preparatory
sketches, and ritual diagrams loaned by the British Museum, the
British Library, the Musee Guimet, and the Bibliotheque nationale de
France-objects that have rarely, if ever, traveled to the United
States.  A highlight of the exhibition is the Diamond Sutra (a
sacred Mahayana Buddhist text) that dates to the year 868 CE.  On
loan to the Getty from the British Library, the Diamond Sutra is the
world's oldest dated complete printed book.

The exhibition features objects from the Library Cave, where more
than 40,000 objects, sealed up for a millennium, were discovered in
1900.  Shortly thereafter, explorers from Britain, France, Russia,
Japan, and the United States came to Dunhuang, where they obtained
thousands of these objects to take to their home countries.

Focusing on the diversity of languages and religions on the Silk
Road, the first exhibition gallery features a Buddhist sutra in
Tibetan with commentary in Chinese, a Jewish prayer in Hebrew, and a
Christian manuscript in Chinese, all written no later than the 10th
century.  The exhibition demonstrates how Buddhist texts prescribed
rules governing artistic practice, displaying a stunning group of
freehand sketches, pounces, and woodblock prints from the Library
Cave.  Superb early Chinese paintings on silk portray scenes from
the life of the Buddha, Buddha preaching, and a bodhisattva leading
an elegant Tang lady toward a paradisiacal afterlife.  All
illuminate how commissions of paintings created personal connections
with the divine for their patrons, while ritual diagrams instruct on
precisely how to create a sacred space.

   "These exquisite Buddhist works, originally from Dunhuang, were
    created not as works of art, but rather as forms of devotion to
    accumulate merit and ensure a better afterlife," says Mimi
    Gardner Gates, director emerita of the Seattle Art Museum and
    chairman of the Dunhuang Foundation.

To illustrate the life of a wall painting and trace its 1,100-year
history-from creation to deterioration and conservation-the
exhibition includes a recreated portion of a wall from Cave 85.
Exhibition videos describe the history and significance of the Mogao
site, as well as modern conservation efforts.  Reproductions of
photographs by Western explorers and others document early
20th-century investigations of the Mogao caves, including the
discovery of the Library Cave.  The site's revitalization in the
20th century, under the stewardship of the Dunhuang Academy,
concludes the exhibition.

Cave Replicas

The Getty Center arrival plaza will house three full-size replica
caves providing visitors with a deeper understanding of the Mogao
site and the scale of the cave temples there.  In China, the
traditional view of replication differs from that of the West,
because copying is considered an important way to master traditions
of Chinese painting.  The replica caves, created by artists from the
Dunhuang Academy's Fine Arts Institute, were constructed through a
painstaking, multiyear process that includes photographing and
printing images of the caves' walls at their original scale, tracing
the images with pencil, and then contour-line drawing on top of the
tracing.  Clay from the local riverbed is used to make the base for
the painting of the primary pigments.  The paintings are then
mounted on the inner surface of the replica cave's wooden framework,
which has been crafted to the exact dimensions of the original cave.

The replicated cave temples span the 5th to the 8th century.  Cave
275 features a large central image of Maitreya, Buddha of the
future, as well as five painted stories of the Buddha's past lives.
The earliest dated cave, Cave 285 was created in 538 CE and 539 CE.
The brilliantly colored, dynamic wall paintings incorporate Hindu
and indigenous Chinese deities into a Buddhist context.  Dating from
the 8th century or Tang dynasty, Cave 320 has a magnificent ceiling
with a central peony motif, surrounded by decorative tent hangings
and numerous small Buddhas.

Multimedia Experience

The exhibition is accompanied by two multimedia galleries, which
will visually immerse visitors in the Mogao site.  The first section
will include a large panoramic projection with an overview of the
Mogao cave temples in their stark desert setting.  In the second
section, visitors will use 3D glasses to experience stereoscopic
images of Cave 45, a finely decorated High Tang cave with a
seven-figure sculpture group that is one of the treasures of Mogao.
This marks the first time that this particular 3D stereoscopic
technology has been used in a museum exhibition.

Cave Temples of Dunhuang: Buddhist Art on China's Silk Road is on
view May 7 - September 4, 2016.  Lead curators of the exhibition
include Neville Agnew, senior principal project specialist at the
Getty Conservation Institute; Marcia Reed, chief curator at the
Getty Research Institute; Fan Jinshi, director emerita of the
Dunhuang Academy; and Mimi Gardner Gates, director emerita of the
Seattle Art Museum and chairman of the Dunhuang Foundation.

The designer of the multimedia galleries and immersive experience is
Garson Yu, artistic director of yU+co.

The Robert H.N. Ho Family Foundation
<URL:http://www.rhfamilyfoundation.org>
is the Presenting Sponsor of Cave Temples of Dunhuang: Buddhist Art
on China's Silk Road.

Lead Corporate Sponsor: East West Bank
<URL:https://www.eastwestbank.com>

Lead Sponsor: Henry Luce Foundation
<URL:http://www.hluce.org>

Corporate Sponsor: yU+co
<URL:http://www.yuco.com>

The exhibition was also made possible also with generous support
from individuals.

The Getty will present a slate of public programs, including musical
performances, lectures, and films related to the exhibition,
including a major international scholarly symposium to be held May
20-21, 2016, in collaboration with the University of California, Los
Angeles.

Publications accompanying the exhibition include a catalogue titled
Cave Temples of Dunhuang: Buddhist Art on China's Silk Road, and a
second edition of Cave Temples of Mogao at Dunhuang: Art and History
on the Silk Road.

For more information about the exhibition, visit

    <URL:http://www.getty.edu/cavetemples>


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