Artists › Painters and Calligraphers
Duan Wenjie
Copyist and scholar of the Dunhuang murals who reached Mogao in 1946, copied more than 340 murals in a few years, and in 1984 became the first president of the Dunhuang Academy.
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.
Duan Wenjie was born in 1917 in Pengxi, Sichuan, to a family from Mianyang. He graduated from the painting department of the National Art School in Chongqing in 1945 and, inspired by Zhang Daqian's exhibition of Dunhuang copies, reached the Mogao caves in 1946 to join the National Dunhuang Art Research Institute. Between 1946 and 1951 he copied more than 340 murals; his best-known work is the restored copy of the Lady of the Military Commissioner Worshipping the Buddha from Cave 130 (1955). He became director of the Dunhuang Cultural Relics Research Institute in 1982 and, in 1984, the first president of the Dunhuang Academy. He edited volumes of Dunhuang mural reproductions and wrote collected essays on the art of the Dunhuang caves. He died in Lanzhou in January 2011.
Life and times
Dates 1917–2011
- 1941Guarding DunhuangTook partage 24