Chang Dai Chien (Neijiang, 1899 - Taipei, 1983)
Chang Dai-chien is regarded as the "Chinese Picasso" and was one of the greatest and most versatile painters in China. Some claim he deserves a place among the greatest painters in the world. He was also a major collector and a forger of artworks. Originally known as a guohua (traditionalist) painter, around 1960 he came to be reconsidered as a modern impressionist and expressionist painter. Chang is remembered as one of the most celebrated painters of the 20th century.
Life and Work
Born into a family of artists in Neijiang, Sichuan, China, he studied textile dyeing techniques in Kyoto, Japan, and returned to build a celebrated career selling his paintings in Shanghai.
The Chinese Muslim general and governor of Qinghai, Ma Bufang, sent Chang to a Tibetan monastery to find assistants able to analyze and copy Buddhist art.
An admirer of the master Shitao, he painted several pictures that sold for high prices because they were taken to be 17th-century works. Until 1941, Zhang Daqian's work was based mainly on the "Four Great Monk Painters of the Qing Dynasty" (Hong Ren, Kun Can, Bada Shanren and Shitao), the four masters of the Wu School of the Ming Dynasty (Shen Zhou, Wen Zhengming, Tang Yin, Qiu Ying) and the landscape painters of the Yuan Dynasty (Huang Gongwang, Wu Zhen, Ni Zan and Wang Meng). In 1941, Chang traveled to the little-explored Dunhuang caves, an artistic paradise with thousands of centuries-old paintings, 2,415 painted statues, sculptures, some 50,000 Buddhist scriptures and historical documents, among other priceless items that had remained hidden from the world until 1900. There he studied Chinese color painting and changed his style, adopting techniques and colors used in little-known historical paintings that Chinese culture had abandoned.
A political activist of the Kuomintang, he left China in 1948 and, after the Chinese Communist Revolution, moved successively to Hong Kong, Darjeeling (India) and Argentina, finally settling in 1953 in Mogi das Cruzes, where he stayed until 1970 and where his children still live. In Brazil, Chang built his ideal residence with funds raised from selling two precious ancient paintings to the Chinese government. He created the famous Garden of the Eight Virtues (Bade Yuan) and dug a lake adorned with five pavilions (Wu Ting Hu). In the early 1960s, Chang abandoned the guohua style of outlined painting, returned to xieyi - ink painting of personal expression - and finally developed an expressive splashed-ink style that sets him apart from all other painters. On leaving Brazil, Chang moved to Carmel (USA), before settling permanently in Taipei, Taiwan.
A meeting between Chang and Picasso in France, in 1956, was seen as an encounter between the leading masters of Eastern and Western art. The two masters exchanged several paintings during this meeting.
Forgeries
As a forger, Chang created works so perfect that they sold for thousands of dollars. Unlike ordinary forgeries, his works, even after being identified as fakes, remained in museums to be admired.
