See 10 Paintings from the Met’s Landmark Chang Dai-Chien Acquisition

In what will surely make for a survey to remember, the Metropolitan Museum of Art has acquired 38 works by the revered Chinese ink painter Chang Dai-chien. The trove includes studies from Dai-chien’s time at Dunhuang, an ancient Buddhist temple complex on the edge of the Gobi Desert, in the 1940s, as well as works from the 1960s and beyond, when his delicate landscapes and still-life unraveled into radiant abstractions.

“Chang Dai-chien stands as one of the most important painters of the modern era. He combined a deep knowledge of classical Chinese culture with a transnational perspective to fashion a style of ink painting that was both locally rooted and connected to a wider global outlook,” Met director Max Hollein said in a statement, alluding to the artist’s three-decade artistic journey, from his birth and early life in China through South Asia—from India to Japan and Taiwan—and, in the 1970s, to his later years in Monterey, California.

According to the museum’s announcement last week, the acquisition is part gift and part purchase from the artist’s daughter, Sing Sheng Chang, with support from a long list of patrons. Chang Dai-chien died in 1983 in Taipei at the age of 83, after self-exiling from mainland China in 1949. The collection includes a self-portrait he made in Hong Kong in 1951, in which he gazes at the viewer, seated in a weightless expanse.

A portion of the acquisitions will be exhibited later this year, while the collection will take center stage in an exhibition of 20th-century Chinese ink painting (guóhuà) scheduled to open in 2028. Explore below for an early glimpse of the artworks.