00:14
brought bringing this podcast episode i don't know i was gonna say brought to you
by but i'm like brought to you by who like you already know that it's from us so
um that's that's kind of stupid but anyway we're bringing this podcast episode from asako's place
because i'm in japan and and uh she kindly invited me over so but but but we had some
microphone issues so we're recording this on iphone um so bear with us on the the quality
but i think it should still be the same but um masako you had a question about
my like we were just talking about um the stuff like the stuff that i do for my work and
did you you had a question yeah i had a question for you so um so the about the painting so once
the painting is done like completed yeah so the what i assumed was that deterioration
starts begins right yeah technically technically right um then from which point do you need the
like how do you call the like the process of conservation yes conservation starts like which
which age or how long ago so so technically there's no rule about you need to wait for x many years
until you can start conservation on artwork and also um another question is that um how do you
know you need to repair you mean um how do you know it's the original art you know whether
like some kind of um i don't know like the color is fade faded somewhere um but you never know
whether it's the intention by the artist yeah yeah yeah so that's a really good question and
it's it's it's sort of the heart of the ethics of conservation right like um you're asking so so the
first question was when when do we know we should start conservation that is um entirely up to the
circumstance of the artwork so um some artworks are immediately valuable so maybe because it was
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done by an artist who is popular at the time of the completion of the artwork so enough people are
interested in that artwork and they want to take good care of them some other art are um not
necessarily that way like people didn't know that this painting was going to be valuable
they didn't pay much attention you know it sat in somebody's attic room basement for centuries and
they found out that it's actually by some very famous artists or someone who became valuable
after their death or something like that right and and you suddenly want to conserve it you know so
there's no really like a timeline for okay like this many years has passed we can start conserving
it's entirely up to sort of the the environment that the artwork is in both in terms of sort of
like the social and economic environment that it's in as well as the physical environment it's in
so if it's been taken a good care of from the beginning it's like it's likely that
the artwork is not that damaged you know if it was commissioned by a king and it sat in some palace
the likelihood is that people took good care of it and it's not like broken but
if it sat in someone's attic room because this artist was never popular when he was alive and
you know people didn't buy it right now people decide suddenly that it's valuable and they want
to do some conservation to increase the value then you know it could have been exposed to rain
light dust rats for all you know so that makes a difference in terms of how damaged the artwork is
so some work can be damaged very quickly some art survives a lot longer
this so so there's that kind of environmental reasons but there's also material reasons so
some materials just are easy to deteriorate it's a lot easier to restore ceramics than
paper for instance ceramics are made to last long they are typically designed to be used and
withstand multiple handling whereas paper prints they are maybe used they were just like sketches
or they were they were like newspaper cartoons that they now decide that it's from a famous
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artist or something so those are not meant to be meant to last so that's really difficult to
conserve some famous example is like ukiyo-e those are really hard to conserve because ukiyo-e used
to be just like chirashi like they were not an artwork they were they were stuff that people
produced very often just as like for casual entertainment entertainment yeah advertisement
advertisement for kabuki or like things like that right like it was meant to be like a chirashi or
like a pamphlet things that people look at and throw away next day so they were never that
carefully made you know they're not on acid-free paper so they are really and so their combination
of fibers like paper fibers and pigments as well as inks right so so there's so many different
components in there and they're very fragile and it's very so oftentimes conservation is done
because there is visible damage and you know it's very easy to tell when the color has faded
so that requires pretty extensive conservation efforts so so ukiyo-e is one of the hardest things
i think and more complex item of artworks to conserve which is very unique because
at the time it's sort of like a similar time frame
prints on cheap paper like ukiyo-e didn't really exist in that in in the world
you know things that people printed on at similar time in the western world are like
prints of books or etchings and oftentimes they didn't involve color so that makes it a lot more
sort of a simpler project to do the conservation it's also mostly often text-based and if it's
and if it's etching
it's it's like it's like metallic right it's it's it's uh copper i don't know what the material is
but it's it's metal so if you can find the original that's also likely in a pretty good
condition so you can reprint them a lot easily than trying to reprint ukiyo-e from the wooden
hanga masters because the chances are that the wood masters are also deteriorated right
so even if you find one it's probably useless so that's that um what was the second question
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i forgot i'm trying to think your second question i was thinking who was your second
yeah i i took too long to answer your first question i was thinking um your second question
was something about um like what like who and how people decide what to conserve was it no no
no oh damn i should have taken notes well it's okay never mind i think you answered some parts
of my second question yes i think so yeah we can stop this recording now and we'll come back
we can listen and then the next episode can be about answering that second question if we didn't
if you didn't answer that question right yeah we can we can check if i answer it and if i didn't
yeah okay okay that's it for the show today thanks for listening and find us on x at
egode science that is e-i-g-o-d-e-s-c-i-e-n-c see you next time
