Chang Shana, one of China’s most treasured artists, is sitting on her living room sofa in Beijing, her eyes fixed on a TV documentary about Dunhuang, the northwestern oasis city where she spent much of her childhood. When a familiar face appears on screen, the 95-year-old breaks into a broad smile.

“That’s my father,” she says, pointing out Chang Shuhong, an accomplished painter best known for his research on the ancient Buddhist murals at the Mogao Grottoes.

Alzheimer’s disease, the most common cause of dementia, has robbed Chang Shana of most memories, yet her face still lights up the moment anyone mentions Dunhuang.

“Apart from Dunhuang, her family, and the caregivers who attend to her day and night, my mother has largely forgotten the people and things outside her immediate world,” says her son, Cui Donghui.

Gone are her memories of studying under world-renowned masters, of her mother walking out on the family, of helping design state gifts and landmark buildings like Beijing’s Great Hall of the People and the Cultural Palace of Nationalities, of losing her beloved husband, and of her tenure as the longest-serving president of the Central Academy of Arts and Design, now Tsinghua University’s Academy of Arts and Design.

On a desk in her bedroom is “Clothing Patterns of China Dunhuang Mural,” which compiles 328 color illustrations of cave murals and sculptures from various periods. “I drew this book. It’s all decorative motifs,” says Chang, standing up. After catching her breath, she points out another book: “This one, ‘Dunhuang! My Father’s Call,’ was written by my father, but I contributed many of the illustrations and written materials.”

Would she like to return to Dunhuang one day? “Yes,” she replies in a soft voice, without hesitation. Then, she slowly wanders back to the sofa to continue watching her documentary.

Life on the move

Chang Shana was born in Lyon, France, in 1931. Her father was among China’s first generation of French-trained artists, and both her parents went on to attend the prestigious Beaux-Arts de Paris school.

After being moved by a photobook about the Mogao Grottoes that he discovered in a secondhand book stall beside the Seine, Chang’s father returned to China alone in 1936 to head the fine arts department at the National Art School in Beiping, predecessor of Beijing’s Central Academy of Fine Arts.

However, as invading Japanese troops advanced toward Beijing, he was forced to flee, eventually moving with the academy to Nanjing in the eastern Jiangsu province — where he was joined by his wife, Chen Zhixiu, and daughter — and then to the southwestern city of Chongqing, which served as the nation’s wartime capital during the War of Resistance Against Japanese Aggression. In 1943, the family relocated again to Dunhuang in the northwestern Gansu province, where Chang Shuhong was appointed director of the National Dunhuang Art Research Institute.

Chang Shana found it difficult adjusting to their austere life among the arid dunes. In her 2013 memoir, “Yellow Sands and Blue Sky,” the artist recalls that first winter night, eating cold noodles with only salt and vinegar, and her father promising, “Things will get better.”

Yet despite the lack of material comforts, she instantly found an abundance of inspiration at the Mogao Grottoes. On days without school, she would walk the dirt roads, past the shimmering poplars, and climb into the grottoes to copy the murals. “I loved going into the caves to draw. I was always eager to do it. My parents never had to tell me to go,” she wrote. She would also chat with the many visiting artists and scholars, laying a strong foundation for her artistic development.

Previously, students had typically copied the murals with tracing paper, which they secured to the walls with thumbtacks, leaving tiny holes. Chang Shuhong prohibited this practice to prevent further damage to the relics, meaning his daughter had to recreate the originals stroke by stroke through observation alone. Although laborious, it helped her develop extraordinary levels of precision.

But the desert took as much as it gave. Under the strain of his responsibilities, Chang Shuhong was often irritable, and his relationship with his wife became fractious. She eventually left him and moved back east in 1945.

Chang Shana was 14. She dropped out of school and stayed home to help with the housework and to knit sweaters for her 4-year-old brother.

That same year, the Nationalist government ordered the Dunhuang Art Research Institute to close. As funding dwindled and workers left, Chang Shuhong traveled extensively to enlist fresh support, eventually recruiting a group of teachers and students from art academies in Chongqing and Chengdu, capital of the neighboring Sichuan province.

With the institute’s future secured, he instructed his daughter to make copies of representative murals covering various Chinese dynasties. In her memoir, Chang recalls her work to recreate the figures of warriors from the Western Wei dynasty (535–556): “The lines followed my feelings; my brushwork was especially free and expressive.”

Finding faith

When Chang turned 17, a Canadian friend of the family sponsored her to study in the United States at what is today Tufts University’s School of the Museum of Fine Arts. There, she took classes in drawing, anatomy, art history, perspective, color, painting, and design.

Although confident in French, she initially struggled with some of the highly specialized English terminology. What baffled her most, though, was the painting course. With abstract expressionism on the rise, her professors required students to create work without recognizable forms or subjects. In a letter to her father, she wrote, “Perhaps I just don’t understand.”

According to her son, Chang’s diary entries from the early 1940s are filled with confusion and unease. She occupied her time with sketching and knitting, often questioning the meaning behind such pursuits. Yet her letters home in 1950 reveal “a completely different person,” he says.

In one, she wrote about “finally finding faith,” and expounded on her belief that art should be accessible and serve the people. In other letters, she displayed a weariness with life overseas. “Staying here, depending on others for everything, life feels so empty,” she wrote. “I have a perpetual sense that something is missing, like I owe a debt.”

Chang returned to China in December 1950 without completing her degree. She immediately began helping her father organize an exhibition of Dunhuang cultural relics in Beijing, featuring copies of murals she and several art researchers had made.

The following year, she was introduced to the influential architects Liang Sicheng and Lin Huiyin, who agreed to recommend her for a teaching assistant position at Tsinghua University’s School of Architecture. Under Lin’s guidance, she and two other students applied traditional cloisonné enamelwork techniques and motifs to everyday items such as table lamps, cigarette cases, and plates.

With a growing portfolio, Chang was commissioned to design themed gifts for the 1952 Asia and Pacific Rim Peace Conference, held in Beijing. She created a silk headscarf and large cloisonné plate with peace dove motifs, inspired by Dunhuang cave paintings from the Sui dynasty (581–618).

When China began reforming its university system in the early 1950s, she transferred to the Department of Applied Arts at the Central Academy of Fine Arts before ultimately joining the Central Academy of Arts and Design in 1956.

Gone too soon

Chang met her first husband while studying in the U.S. The couple married in China in 1953 but divorced after just a few years. The artist barely mentions this time in her memoir, not even naming him.

Her second husband, Cui Taishan, was a Japanese-language interpreter. They met while part of a Chinese cultural delegation to Japan in 1961 and were married two years later, spending 26 years together until Cui’s death in 1989.

The artist’s friend, Huang Xuanzi, recalls that Chang often talked to her late husband’s photo before she developed dementia. “She’d grumble at him for leaving her too soon, then turn to me and say, ‘Look at him, always smiling at me like that,’” she says, adding that Chang still sometimes recognizes him in photographs. “One day, she suddenly smiled and said to me, ‘Cui Taishan was very handsome.’”

Huang recalls a thick stack of flower studies Chang had painted when she was pregnant, each accompanied by a short poem handwritten by her husband. “They were never published, so almost no one outside the family knows about them,” she explains. “You can clearly feel the depth of their affection in those paintings and poems.”

In 1983, Chang was appointed president of the Central Academy of Arts and Design, leaving her less time for family. Around the same time, Cui was diagnosed with diabetes and then liver cancer. Even during his final days, she was unable to stay with him full time, yet he would always reassure her, “You go ahead with your work. I’m fine.” He was just 62 when he died.

The artist struggled to cope with the combination of grief and work stress. “There were photos of her husband everywhere in the house,” says her sister-in-law, Wang Fulan. “She would always say, ‘He left us too soon. He was so young.’ She felt that she had devoted herself entirely to her work and left household matters to her husband, and that was what had worn him down.”

In later years, Chang told a friend: “I have done right by everyone and everything in my life. My father Chang Shuhong wanted me to carry on the cultural legacy of Dunhuang, and I spent my life doing so. Lin Huiyin mentored me to become a designer, and I devoted myself to that career. The only person I failed was my husband, Cui Taishan.”

Forever home

Shortly after losing her husband, Chang’s father was diagnosed with Alzheimer’s. His condition remained largely stable until he took a serious fall at age 92. After that, his memory began deteriorating rapidly, and he passed away two years later in 1994.

Huang says Chang Shana was also healthy and mentally sharp until her early 90s. She might forget small things, but a little prompting was enough to bring her back.

During the pandemic, her son Cui Donghui couldn’t visit in person; he could see her only through the security camera installed at her home. When he checked late at night, he often saw her lying alone on the sofa watching television. When he was finally able to return, she opened the door, looked at him, and said, “Who are you?”

Leafing through his mother’s book, “Clothing Patterns of China Dunhuang Mural,” he proudly remarks, “This is her life’s work. She systematically cataloged the motifs from different periods and defined their evolutionary progression. This foundational body of work is still essential today, whether for research or for the development of cultural products.”

All the detailed illustrations inside were completed during a special trip Chang took to the Mogao Grottoes in 1959 with two colleagues. For the artist, it was a joyous return to the place she once called home.

“We were young then,” she wrote in her memoir. “We rode horses and camels, climbed the Singing Sand Dunes barefoot, and had an absolutely wonderful time.”

At 95, the journey to Dunhuang is impossible. Yet smiling at that flickering TV screen, she is already back among the caves. The memories are gone, but the patterns remain.

This article, reported by Li Mei, edited by Peng Wei, originally appeared in The Paper. It has been translated and edited for brevity and clarity, and is republished here with permission.

Contributions: He Kai; translator: Carrie Davies; editors: Wang Juyi and Hao Qibao.