Zhang Daqian
The cosmopolitan ink painter.
Zhang Daqian copied the murals at Dunhuang and later lived in Brazil, the United States and Taiwan. His late works in splashed colour approach abstraction.
Zhang Daqian was born in 1899 in Neijiang in Sichuan province into a family in which several members were artistically gifted. His mother and his elder brother were painters. As a teenager he was captured by bandits and held for about a hundred days. He studied textile dyeing in Japan and was briefly a Buddhist monk, hence the name Daqian, which is a Buddhist term.
He learned ink painting by copying the old masters, especially Shitao and Bada Shanren. He became so skilled that his forgeries of Shitao fooled the foremost experts of the day and are now in several museums. He was already one of China's best-known painters in the 1920s and 1930s.
In 1941–1943 he travelled to the caves of Dunhuang in north-western China, where with assistants he copied hundreds of Buddhist murals spanning many centuries. The work drew attention to the ancient art but also attracted criticism, as he was accused of having damaged layers of paintings.
After the Communist victory in 1949 he left China. He lived in Argentina, in Brazil, where he built a large garden, and in California, finally settling in Taipei in 1978. In 1956 he met Picasso in France. In the 1960s, as his eyesight deteriorated, he developed a new technique of splashed ink and colour, above all deep blue and green. The mountains dissolve into fields of colour and approach Abstract Expressionism, yet remain rooted in Chinese tradition.
Zhang Daqian died in Taipei in 1983, and his home there is now a museum. He is regarded as one of the foremost Chinese painters of the 20th century and one of the first to become internationally famous. His works now sell for very high sums.