Conservation and Restoration of the Tokyo National Museum Collection

This is the fifteenth annual exhibition of artworks and other items in our collection that were restored in the past year. It is an opportunity to share critical aspects of the restorations, the restoration processes, and the discoveries they made possible.

The museum strikes a balance between exhibition and conservation of cultural properties, thus allowing these properties to be passed down to future generations under the best possible conditions. The "clinical conservation" practiced at our museum is based on three concepts: (1) Analysis of the objects and their exhibition and storage environments; (2) preventive conservation, in which these environments are made suitable for the objects based on the analysis; (3) and restorative conservation, which ranges from emergency treatments such as mending breaks or preventing the peeling of pigments, to full-scale restorations involving disassembly of the objects.

This year, 16 items of various genres that underwent full-scale restoration and eight texts that required partial restoration are on display. Joining these is a woodblock lent by the Imperial Household Agency Office in Kyoto. It was used to make patterned Chinese-style paper - a sample of which is also on display - for the restoration of the Cypress Trees painting exhibited in Room Two.

This exhibition aims to increase understanding of the museum's role in the exhibition and conservation of cultural properties, as well as to stimulate interest in these properties and their cultural and historical backgrounds.