Pictorial tribute to Dunhuang pioneer

A piece of Chang Shana's work. [Photo provided to China Daily]

Chang Shana lived in Dunhuang for nearly six years before she was sent to the School of the Museum of Fine Arts in Boston, in the United States. In Dunhuang, where she leaned the basics of painting, she made facsimiles of the murals, under the guidance of her father, researchers at the institute and visiting artists.

Copies of her works are now on show at her solo exhibition, Everlasting Beauty of Dunhuang, at Beijing's National Art Museum of China.

These paintings show deities and sutras－a testimony to Dunhuang's past glories as a major stop on the ancient Silk Road.

Also, they encapsulate the memories of a teenage girl in Dunhuang, where she had to cope with harsh living conditions and her parents' divorce.

Liu Dawei, the chairman of the China Artists Association, remembers how difficult life in Dunhuang was in the late 1970s.

Liu, then a postgraduate of Chinese painting at the Central Academy of Fine Arts, traveled there with classmates to study the murals.