Here in Vancouver there are about 6 frame shops that do this type of work on a daily basis. As you may know about 25% of the population here is Asian so there are lots of original works from China, Japan and other Asian countries framed here. I have seen it being done while calling on these shops. I phoned a couple today to try and see if they would put down on paper how they do it. I also asked if there were any books on the subject. One said there was an excellent book published by the Beijing Art Museum, and he has it for sale, but it is written in Chinese. This customer also imports and sells all the supplies required to do the mounting and he told me that one of his goals is to publish a book in English on how to do Oriental rice paper mounting. He sells the glue along with a wide variety of rice papers both plain and patterned.
These stores each have one or more flat doors hinged to the wall. They place large sheets of rice paper on these hinged doors and glue the outside edges to the door with a light coating of rice glue. They then use this archival rice glue and brush a thin layer on to the rice paper put on the door. They then take the artwork and smooth it out on to the glued rice paper.
When this is done and dried they take the print off with the first layer of paper glued to the back. They will then put up another sheet of rice paper and then glue the print and the first sheet to the new second sheet of rice paper. They will take down the print now on two layers of rice paper and may repeat this a third or even a fourth time to get the required thickness of the "substrate." They will then use the colour or patterned rice papers to put a narrow border around the print, gluing it similar to mounting the art to the rice paper. This looks just like the mat in Western framing. At the bottom and sides they will butt the horizontal and vertical borders into each other.
The customer may they ask to have the mounted and finished artwork put into a frame, or they may just take it home and hang it as is. If the customer has it put into a frame and wants to take the artwork somewhere they can simply take it out of the frame, roll it up and put it in a tube to transport it.
A busy frame shop specializing in mounting Oriental art will have four or five of these doors in their shop and each side of the door will have a piece of art in various stages of mounting. It is much more labour intensive than mounting the Western way and the shops charge more for it as well. I may have oversimplified the procedure, but you should get the idea. The owners have told me it takes much longer to learn the proper procedures than does Western framing techniques.
If anyone wants the supplies e-mail me and I will give you the name of the shop that wholesales the supplies.
Alan Sturgess
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Accent Art Distributors Ltd
40 East 60th Avenue, Vancouver Canada, eh!
"The Retailer's Wholesaler, Not the Retailing Wholesaler."
Distributor Member of National Distributor Network
Check NDN Web site for a NDN Distributor in your area.
http://www.ndnframing.com/
