Gansu children paint Dunhuang tales at Shanghai exhibition

Dunhuang Dreams: Young Sparks, Painted Tales, a charity art exhibition which opened on Saturday at The Pool by X Museum in Shanghai, brings together 80 Dunhuang‑themed paintings by 33 students from Koutouba Nine-Year School in Wenxian county, Longnan city, Northwest China’s Gansu province.

Running until Oct 11, the exhibition is a collaboration between X Museum, the Sunflower Initiative under the Beijing Apple Charity Foundation, Taikoo Li Qiantan Shanghai, and the Wenxian County Education Bureau.

Wenxian county sits deep within the lush Qinling-Bashan mountains in southeastern Gansu, while Dunhuang lies in the arid desert to the northwest. Despite these contrasting landscapes, history connects them. During the Qing Dynasty (1644–1911), migrants from Wenxian settled in Dunhuang, establishing villages and linguistic ties that endure today. This cultural bridge now extends into the art classrooms of Koutouba Nine-Year School.

Despite limited resources, local teachers have built a unique curriculum centered on Dunhuang art. Students learn color, line, and composition, utilizing locally sourced materials such as mountain soil to craft their own painting boards. Through hands-on practice, they reinterpret classic grotto motifs, including feitian(flying apsaras), the nine-colored deer, and the thousand Buddhas.

“Through this process, Dunhuang art is no longer encountered simply as a distant heritage preserved in textbooks, but becomes a visual tradition that the students can touch, observe, imagine, and rearticulate in their own work,” said the curatorial team.

This Shanghai showcase is part of X Museum’s broader mission to promote Dunhuang culture, as part of the institution’s commitment to advancing traditional Chinese culture. The museum jointly curated the residency project Local Actions and Hourglass Residency Project: Season One Exhibition, presented at the Art Museum of Nanjing University of the Arts in 2025. In 2025 and 2026, the museum supported presenting two special exhibitions at Dunhuang International Convention and Exhibition Center.

X Museum says it aims to tell the millennium-old Dunhuang culture to wider audiences, while fostering broader social participation in support of a long‑term development of cultural philanthropy.