The undertaking of the painters at the Gongbi Academy of the Chinese National Academy of Arts, which Zhang directs, was to re-create the mural and to "fake" its aging — water stains, weathering, and mottling, among others — grounded in experience, knowledge accumulation, and deduction, rather than baseless imagination.
To achieve the effect, Zhang's team overcame many difficulties. Han Maoyuan, a participating artist, says he found the data acquisition and color management in the preliminary stage incredibly challenging. The Met gallery's lighting is relatively dim, and the colors would change depending on the lighting.
"We must first establish a stable, reliable color conversion standard," Han says. "That is to say, when making the copy back in Beijing, we needed to ensure the colors appear as closely as possible to the original we saw at The Met."
At The Met, the team used a lift to examine the mural closely. They repainted selected parts on clay panels and revised the details to achieve a satisfying similarity. These samples would later form the basis of the reproduction in Beijing.
Painters then worked on an earthen ground layer made with soil sourced from Guangsheng. Zhang says that while painting the original lines and colors, they also tried to capture the cracks, peeling and patinas.
The team corrected misalignments from previous conservation efforts. For example, previous restorers mismatched a five-centimeter gap between the Buddha of Medicine's head and body, causing the deity's head to shift outward toward his right shoulder. The facsimile corrected this misplacement.
Han says damage and loss are part of the work's history, and so are the restoration traces in transmission. "We do not need to make a complete, perfect piece, but we must present the mural as truthfully and accurately as possible."
