Dai Dunbang

Dai Dunbang (also rendered Dunbang Dai in some Western auction listings, a name order variant rather than a different artist) was born in 1938 in Shanghai, China. He studied at the First Normal School in Shanghai, completing his studies around 1956, after which he worked as an editor for youth newspapers. In 1976 he joined the Research Bureau at the Shanghai Institute of Arts and Crafts. From 1980 he taught at the Institute of Technology at Shanghai Jiao Tong University, and in 1981 he was appointed deputy director of the university's Office of Research on Art. He later held a professorship in the School of Humanities at Shanghai Jiao Tong University, which also hosts a Dai Dunbang Art Research Center connected to his donated works. In 2002 he founded the comics magazine Lianbo.

Dai Dunbang's reputation rests on monumental illustrated cycles built up over decades: 108 Figures of Water Margin, Portraits of Water Margin Characters, and One Hundred Figures from Dream of the Red Chamber, alongside extensive character paintings tied to Journey to the West. As of this writing, no obituary, gallery statement, or major art press report documents his death. Auction databases and family-run social media accounts describe him in the present tense as recently as mid-2026, and no source records a death date, so this profile treats him as living. His exact birth date has not been independently confirmed beyond the birth year of 1938.

Named critical commentary on Dai Dunbang in major English-language outlets could not be located, so no verbatim quotations appear in this profile. His standing instead rests on institutional and professional markers: an early national prize for comics creation in 1962, a second prize tied to an English-language edition of The Dream of Red Mansions in 1980, and inclusion in state museum programming, including a feature display of his Journey to the West character paintings at the Shanghai Powerlong Museum. Within Chinese illustration and popular ink painting, he is consistently described as a central figure for his illustrations of classical novels.

Dai Dunbang's market runs primarily through Asian auction houses rather than blue-chip Western galleries. Artprice records 188 public auction appearances for his work, concentrated in the drawing and watercolor category. A single, fully documented all-time auction record, meaning a specific work, price, house, and date all confirmed together, could not be established from available sources. MutualArt cites realized prices reaching about USD 1,105,539 for works on paper, but that figure is not tied to a named work, a specific sale date, or an auction house in the sources available, so it is treated here as an unverified upper indicator rather than a confirmed record.

There is no catalogue raisonne for Dai Dunbang and no confirmed gallery or estate representation in the sources reviewed. His auction footprint is real but thin by international standards, concentrated in Hong Kong and mainland Chinese sales, and no single fully documented, dated, highest-price sale could be confirmed in public listings. Collectors should also be aware that basic biographical facts, an exact birth date and a fully confirmed current living status, remain unverified beyond a 1938 birth year and the absence of any reported death.