Difficulty: Summiteer (Level 3)
In the Chinese art area at the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York in the United States, one artwork grabs visitors’ attention right away.
When you enter the gallery with Chinese Buddhist art, you see a large wall filled with images of a Buddhist gathering.
Here is the Medicine Buddha, a mural from the 14th century. It comes from the Yuan dynasty, which lasted from 1279 to 1368.
Zhang Jian, the director of the Meticulous Painting Institute at the Chinese National Academy of Arts, was very impressed by the work. For three years, Zhang worked with Chinese artists and scholars to carefully study every crack, line and mark to create a full-size copy. Making a copy is much easier than bringing the artefact back to China.
In 1928, the 700-year-old relic left China after being sold by impoverished monks.
In a time when the relationship between the US and China faces difficulties, people from both countries still work together on cultural projects.
