Sichuan Museum
Southwest China's largest general museum, built around a controversial painter's copies of Buddhist cave murals.
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About this audio guide
This guide to the Sichuan Museum in Chengdu looks at luminous Buddhist murals that seem centuries old but were painted in the twentieth century by Zhang Daqian, an artist who may also be the reason some of the real originals no longer exist. It follows his roughly two and a half years at the Mogao Caves at Dunhuang starting in 1941, copying wall paintings and peeling back outer layers to see what lay beneath, and the anger that spread through Chinese art circles once word of the peeling got out.
This audio guide was created using AI.
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