Dunhuang's American guardian angel talks conservation

Martha Victoria Demas, who is an American Senior Project Specialist of the Getty Conservation Institute, won the "Friendship Award 2010" by Chinese State Government this year due to her excellent job and great contribution on the conservation of Mo Gao Ku (Mogao Grottoes) in Gansu Province.

Interviewer: What do you think about being awarded with China's Friendship Award 2010?

Demas: I think it was a great honor, and I know how important it is in China. I feel very privileged to receive the award. I also feel very privileged to be working with excellent Chinese colleagues who do wonderful works, want to learn and want to do what's best for China. It is a great working relationship. Our Chinese colleagues appreciated us for our expertise, and I appreciate their willing to learn those experiences for cultural heritage conservation.

Interviewer: After more than 10 years of working in China's Dunhuang, do you still remember the first time you saw it?

Demas: Yes, I do. It was 1995, the very first year that I started working in China. Although I had already done lots of preparation work on Dunhuang due to the fact my institution had been working here, I was still shocked by it. It was a magnificent site. There's nothing like it, really. It's an art gallery of the Buddhist art in China. Although Dunhuang is located in the desert, every part of it — like those wall paintings and figures inside those caves — was absolute magnificent. It deserves to be one of China's premier sites

Interviewer: As we all know, doing cultural heritage conservation is not an easy job. I wonder can you give me some examples of its challenges?

Demas: Yes, it does have lots of challenges. And one of the biggest ones, which is not just particular to Mo Gao Ku, but also other global sites, is managing visitors to the site. As a world-famous cultural heritage site, Mo Gao Ku gets tens of thousands of visitors every year, and that's quite difficult for a place, which was not originally built to accommodate that many people, so we work together with the Dunhuang Academy to come up with strategies for managing visitors and trying to determine how many visitors should go to the site, how many is too many, when it would started getting damage from too many visitors, so we did lots of scientific studies to look at the impacts that visitors bring to the wall paintings.

We were also concerned about the visitors' experiences and interpretation. After so much work had been done, Dunhuang Academy has become a real leader of visitor management in China, and the precious experiences and expertise are excellent examples that other sites in China and world should take advantage of.

Talking about challenges, there is another big one, which is conserving wall paintings. We want to make sure the wall paintings are still there in hundreds of years and even last for thousands of years, so you have to understand what's happening there and why the wall paintings are deteriorating and that requires one to undertake lots of scientific analysis. It is really looking at the way that materials decay, so that's a major aspect of the work as well. And we're trying to develop methodologies and treatments to address these problems.

Besides, we also have to know about the environment and how to control it because we don't want the environment to fluctuate constantly, but rather a stable situation. We don't want too much humidity, too much water and moisture in the caves, so all of those factors you can try to control but it's extremely difficult because Dunhuang is not a museum. You can do climate control in the building but not for those caves and wall paintings at the site.

Interviewer: What if some natural disasters, like an earthquake, were to happen?

Demas: Well, if an earthquake happened, it could cause lots of damage. You know, you can prepare for earthquakes and do some emergency preparations, thus you would know what to do and how to act quickly, but you can never control against earthquakes and no one can do anything to stop earthquakes. So you should think about what measures should be put in place that might mitigate and lessen the impacts. It is really pretty limited what you can do when earthquakes happen.

Interviewer: Have you ever considered doing or you have already done some replicas of those wall paintings?

Demas: The Dunhuang Academy is famous for its copy work, and they have beautiful reproductions of the caves. Some caves in Dunhuang are too small to be visited, but people could visit the reproductions of those caves. So that's one way, and the other way is photographs. And increasingly Dunhuang Academy is way ahead in terms of their photography program, and they are doing virtual reconstructions to the caves, which actually attract many visitors and reduce the number of visitors to the real site of Mo Gao Ku.

Interviewer: What's your motivation for choosing to work in China?

Demas: Actually, I came China to do the job was because of work at the very beginning. A colleague of mine, who also won the "Friendship Award" about ten years ago, introduced the Dunhuang program to Getty and promoted the cooperation of China and Getty on the Dunhuang program in 1990. And I came to China in 1995 as a part of Getty's work. But certainly Dunhuang and China have aroused great interest in me since I got here. And after so many years that I have been working in a place filled with Buddhist art, I think that I get some spirit of the Buddhism too.

I am not a Buddhist, but it gives me a sensitive trainability. Because the art of Buddhism is so beautiful, the locations in the desert are so beautiful and the wonderful mountains and sands, it is really a magnificent place. Working with archaeology in places like Dunhuang makes me so satisfied and interested in doing anything related to my work, and I feel very happy and lucky to work in this field.

It is really a great pleasure and great privilege for me to work in China with my excellent colleagues. I very much appreciate the recognition that my Chinese colleagues and China's State government given to me, and I love my job in Dunhuang, I love China and Chinese people.


By People's Daily Online