Dunhuang Painted-Sculpture Craft

The Dunhuang painted-sculpture craft has endured for over a thousand years, born alongside the cutting of the Mogao caves and the painting of their murals, carrying the highest achievement of Chinese Buddhist art from the fourth to the fourteenth century. Now near extinction, it was listed as a Gansu provincial intangible-heritage representative item in 2018 (number 60Ⅷ-6), with the sculptor Du Yongwei as its applicant and representative inheritor.

Traditional Dunhuang painted sculpture builds an armature of wood bound with reed, models it in successive layers of locally refined Dunhuang clay, and once dry paints and opens the features with mineral pigments; its steps—framing, claying, modelling, polishing, raised-line gesso, gilding and colouring—follow the same lineage as the cave's successive images.

The Dunhuang painted-sculpture craft is a living witness to the history of Chinese Buddhist sculpture and Silk Road artistic exchange, carrying the material DNA of the cave art; its preservation is irreplaceable for keeping the life of Dunhuang culture alive.

The craft is kept alive, studied and displayed chiefly at the Mogao Li Craftsman Village.