Artists › Painters and Calligraphers
Chang Shuhong
Oil painter who, back from France, went to Dunhuang in 1943 and in 1944 became first director of the National Dunhuang Art Research Institute, leading the protection of the Mogao caves and the copying of their murals.
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 Alternative name Tingfang
Chang Shuhong was born in 1904 in Hangzhou, Zhejiang. He went to France in 1927 and studied painting in Lyon and Paris; his oils Grapes and Portrait of Shana are now in the Centre Pompidou in Paris. Returning in 1936, he taught at the National Beiping Art Academy. He reached Dunhuang in March 1943, and when the National Dunhuang Art Research Institute was set up the following year he became its first director, organising the clearing of drifted sand, the building of a protective wall and the copying of the murals. From 1951 he directed the Dunhuang Cultural Relics Research Institute, becoming honorary director from 1982. He wrote the memoir Ninety Years: Fifty Years at Dunhuang, and died in Beijing in June 1994.
Life and times
Dates 1904–1994
- 1941Guarding DunhuangTook partage 37
- 1944National Dunhuang Art Research Institute Foundedage 40