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China has a long cultural history and an extensive heritage of valuable Chinese silk paintings. Over a long period of time, having passed from generation to generation, many paintings have suffered considerable damage. There is need for more professional conservation knowledge and technology to prevent them from further deterioration, and to restore their original appearance and artistic value as much as possible. Suitable mending material should not only be composed of similar fiber type and fabric construction as the original painting, but also should approximate the original fabric in terms of texture, luster and color. Therefore, completely new materials are unsuitable for mending purposes unless they first have been subjected to an aging process. This exploratory study, tries to analyze and quantify the elements and standards that mending experts require for their work, by using objective scientific evaluation methods in order to facilitate and improve the development and manufacture of suitable mending materials. To combine theory with practicality, a special Japanese silk painting textile was chosen (岩野繪絹) as the research mending material and five different dosages of Co60□-ray irradiation were applied to obtain different levels of aging. Color change and other property changes of the five artificially aged silk mending materials were tested and assessed including suface conditions, bending ability, wrinkle recovery, electron spins frequency and subjective hand of the test fabric. Simultaneously, the result of this study also reaffirms the possibility of applying Co60-□ ray irradiation to produce artificial aged silk mending materials. At the same time, the influence of different timing intervals was also examined. By means of the Spectrophotometer, small color changes among all of the samples could be measured which were not discernable by naked eye under the specified light source. By using Scanning Electron Microscopy, changes of surface condition at various aging levels of each sample could be observed. Employment of the Electron Paramagnetic Resonance Spectrometer (EPR) could measure the frequency of electrin spins of all samples revealing the nature of different levels of aging. Furthermore, the EPR results also could verify the stability of the aged mending materials over time. Simultaneous use of the above three objective evaluation methods plus the subjective hand evaluation in this study, and the results obtained will have an impact in the development of aged mending materials for historcal Chinese silk paintings and hopefully lead to further progress in related research and its practical application.
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