Restoring Broken Artifacts While Maintaining Historical Integrity with Transparent 3D Printing
The Zhejiang Provincial Museum restores ancient ceramics, making missing parts visible while preserving historical traces with unique technology.
Edited by EE Staff
Museums
Oct 19, 2026
For cultural heritage enthusiasts and museum curators, restoring ancient artifacts without compromising their historical integrity has always been a complex challenge. But recently, the Zhejiang Provincial Museum showcased a groundbreaking approach that not only restores ancient ceramics but allows broken porcelain to be reborn through what they call blank space, which is a technique that has been labeled “aesthetics far ahead of its time.” The innovation includes a 3D printer capable of printing highly transparent materials. This technology not only restores broken antiquities for exhibitions, it also allows history buffs to bring a piece of “museum-grade” cultural heritage into their own homes.
While traditional restoration relies on opaque resins to fill missing pieces that produce a faux-antique finish which can obscure the genuine marks of history, the blank space approach is meant to complete rather than cover up the defects. Inspired by the restoration concepts of the Western Xia Tombs, this philosophy of complementing reality with imagination avoids covering old marks with new materials. Instead, transparent materials preserve the restoration traces. The transparent pieces allow viewers to instantly distinguish the historical original from the modern addition, giving dignity to the artifact’s brokenness.
Transparent 3D Printing
This avant-garde aesthetic is not born from thin air; it is built on high-precision digital scanning and scientific modeling. The entire workflow consists of five steps.
High-precision digital scanning — Using a SCANTECH NimbleTrack-CR non-contact 3D scanner the team was able to attain data on microscopic textures invisible to the naked eye, including porcelain fracture edges and signs of wear over time. Once accurately captured, this non-destructive data provides an authentic digital texture for later operations.
Scientific modeling — To complete missing sections of an artifact, it is necessary to refer to shapes and patterns of similar artifacts and then digitally model them to complete the missing sections. As restoration team leader Zhan Qingjing stated, “Every step is designed so that the defect is seen, rather than hidden.”
Transparent 3D printing — Once a digital model is confirmed by the experts, the replacement parts are 3D printed using Raise3D’s High Clear Resin V1 on the company’s DF2+ series printer. When producing mating parts across different materials such as fitting a resin part to a porcelain artifact, dimensional accuracy becomes critical. The DLP printing technology significantly minimizes part distortion compared to LCD technology, which ensures that the printed transparent fragments fit the ancient ceramic edges perfectly for seamless integration. In addition, Raise3D’s high-transparency resin is highly resistant to yellowing, and its surface can be easily post-processed with clear coats. This allows the 3D-printed restoration parts, once integrated with the artifact, to highlight the broken beauty of the historical original through a crystal-like, transparent texture.
Fine post-processing — Once the replacement parts are printed, they go through a number of stages where they are cleaned, coated, and checked for accurate alignment with the original artifact.
Bonding restoration — Bonding the 3D printed part to the original artifact completes the tasks and is the final step before offering the artifact to the public for viewing.
Inspired by this transparent restoration technique, the Zhejiang Provincial Museum has launched a series of cultural creative products. Thanks to the scalability and precision of the transparent 3D printer, artifact lovers can purchase scaled-down replicas of these ceramics. These creative souvenirs feature the exact same transparent resin integration, allowing customers to touch museum-grade restoration techniques right at home. By combining technology with the aesthetics of blank space, the Zhejiang Provincial Museum is not just preserving the past but redefining how we interact with the marks of history.
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