Conservation and restoration experts are nearing a successful conclusion to a project to strip and preserve two overlapping layers of historic murals from the walls of the Wudi Temple (五帝) in Tainan’s Jhongsi District (中西).
In 2013, land surveys conducted as a part of the temple’s ongoing renovation discovered that sections of the temple’s walls were on plots owned by neighboring landowners and would need to be removed to avoid legal disputes, a member of the temple’s board of managers said.
However, the murals on the walls — created by two generations of a local artisan family surnamed Pan (潘) — are of cultural and sentimental value to the community, and it was decided that the temple should preserve the murals until they could be attached to new walls, the board said.
As the temple has not been designated a historic site by the government, its renovation has received no public funding, but the board said it was able to enlist experts from multiple groups concerned with historical conservation.
The affected walls had two layers of murals: two large murals, two medium-sized murals and four small murals, with the newer sets painted over the old, said Wu Ching-tai (吳慶泰), a conservator-restorer at the Kaohsiung-based National Science and Technology Museum.
Muralist Pan Chun-yuan (潘春源) created the older works during the Taisho period (1912 to 1926) and his son Pan Li-shui (潘麗水) later worked over his father’s creations during the Showa period (1926 to 1945), Wu said.
The surface-layer murals, including 1cm of underlying concrete, were extracted by stripping, a process in which the murals are broken down into smaller fragments, which were reassembled by technicians onto a medium, Wu said, adding that the process was then repeated on the older murals beneath, resulting in the preservation of both layers.
As the original wall surfaces were not perfectly even, the extracted murals contain multiple gaps, and the plan is to employ Pan Yueh-hsiung (潘岳雄) — a third-generation muralist of the Pan family — to fill in the blanks, then attach both sets of murals to the walls of the temple’s expanded premises, Wu said.
“This temple has been in the neighborhood for a long time and is a piece of its collective memory. If we demolish the old to build the new, simply because we now have money, we would be disrespecting those who contributed to the old temple and destroying the work of artisans,” temple manager Chen Shih-wei (陳世偉) said.
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