[1] Dong was born in 1914 in the Keqiao district of Shaoxing prefecture in Zhejiang, China.

After graduating from the latter in 1939, he attended the Paris Art Institute at Hanoi, Vietnam for half a year.

In July 1949, he participated in painting the first portrait of Mao Zedong at Tiananmen.

The Founding Ceremony of the Nation not only became a source for the later "Red Light" movement during the Cultural Revolution, but was twice amended by Dong after internal conflicts within the Communist Party to remove the figures of Gao Gang and Liu Shaoqi.

In 1972, his student Jin Shangyi removed the figure of Lin Boqu from a copy of the painting.