Liao Jingwen

Liao Jingwen was assistant to and third wife of artist Xu Beihong. After his death in 1953, she served as head of the Xu Beihong Memorial Museum and the curator of his extensive art collection. She was born in 1923 to a family of intellectuals in Liuyang, Hunan. She studied at Jinling Women's College and China Art University, where she met Xu Beihong in 1942. She worked as his assistant and married him in 1946, after he divorced his first wife. She had two children with Xu, and another child with her second husband Huang Xinghua, whom she married in 1956 and divorced in 1966. ¹ She dedicated her life to preserving and promoting Xu's legacy, and donated over 1200 of his artworks to the Chinese state. She also wrote a memoir of Xu's life, which was published in 1982. She was a respected writer and calligrapher herself, and published several books and articles on art and culture. She died of natural causes in Beijing in 2015, at the age of 92. ¹