Chang was born in 1899 in Sichuan Province to a financially struggling but artistic family, whose members had converted to Roman Catholicism.

[3] The governor of Qinghai, Ma Bufang, sent Chang to Sku'bum to seek helpers for analyzing and copying Dunhuang's Buddhist art.

By 1968, they had relocated to their personal residence, which the artist dubbed 'K'e-yi Chu' - meaning "barely habitable" or "just okay" when translated.

Chang's first California solo exhibition in 1967 at Stanford University attracted an opening reception crowd of a thousand.

[7][8] During his years of wandering he had several wives simultaneously, curried favor with influential people, and maintained a large entourage of relatives and supporters.

[2] A meeting between Chang and Picasso in Nice, France in 1956 was viewed as a summit between the preeminent masters of Eastern and Western art.

His elder brother Zhang Shanzi, who was a famous painter at the time, brought him to a literary salon in 1924 where his first appearance impressed the attendants.

[13] In the late 1920s and 1930s, Chang moved to Beijing where he befriended other famous artists, including Yu Feian, Wang Shensheng, Ye Qianyu, Chen Banding, Qi Baishi, and Pu Xinyu.

In the early 1940s, Chang led a group of artists in copying the Buddhist wall paintings in the Mogao and Yulin caves.

In 1945, Chang's works, as a part of a UNESCO's touring contemporary art exhibition, were shown in Paris, London, Prague and Geneva.

Ten years later, Picasso received a gift from Zhang– two Chinese writing brushes made from the hair of 2500 three-year-old cows.

When he wrote an inscription on a painting, he sometimes included a postscript describing the type of paper, the age and the origin of the ink, or the provenance of the pigments he had used."

The painting, which was allegedly a landscape by the Five Dynasties period master Guan Tong, is one of Chang’s most ambitious forgeries and serves to illustrate both his skill and his audacity.

[20] Museum curators are cautioned to examine Chinese paintings of questionable origins, especially those from the bird and flower genre with the query, "Could this be by Chang Dai-chien?