Artists › Painters and Calligraphers
Zhang Daqian
Painter who copied the wall paintings of the Mogao and Yulin caves at Dunhuang from 1941 to 1943, turning to a grander, archaic manner, and in later life developed splashed-ink and splashed-colour landscapes.
Mural of the event “Guarding Dunhuang”, which this person took part in.
The Mogao Caves, cut from the Sixteen Kingdoms period onward, preserve a wealth of murals and painted sculpture, but they lay neglected for nearly four hundred years and more than a hundred caves were buried by drifting sand. From 1941 to 1943 Zhang Daqian and his pupils copied murals at the Mogao and Yulin caves and produced several hundred copies. In 1944 the National Dunhuang Art Research Institute was founded at Mogao with Chang Shuhong as its first director; working almost entirely by hand, its staff cleared centuries of sand from more than three hundred caves, built more than a kilometre of wall and began surveying the caves and copying the murals. The institute later grew into the Dunhuang Academy.
Also known as Original name Zhang Zhengquan · Zhang Yuan · Zi Jiyuan · Hao Daqian Jushi
Zhang Daqian, born Zhang Zhengquan and later renamed Yuan, with the courtesy name Jiyuan and the sobriquet Daqian Jushi, was born in 1899 in Neijiang, Sichuan. In 1917 he went with his brother Zhang Shanzi to Kyoto to study textile dyeing; in 1919 he moved to Shanghai to study calligraphy with Zeng Xi and Li Ruiqing, and in 1924 held his first solo exhibition there, making his early name with copies in the manner of Ming and Qing painters. From 1941 to 1943 he led a team copying the wall paintings of the Mogao and Yulin caves at Dunhuang, and his style turned grander and more archaic, as in his After Wang Ximeng's A Thousand Li of Rivers and Mountains (1948). After 1949 he lived in Hong Kong, India and the Americas, and from the 1960s developed splashed-ink and splashed-colour landscapes such as Lake Aihen (1968). He died in Taipei in April 1983.
Life and times
Dates 1899–1983
- 1941Guarding DunhuangTook partage 42
- c. 1941Zhang Daqian Copies the Dunhuang Muralsage 42