The murals ( 壁画) are expected to fade within a year, but the city hopes a proposed (被提议的) street painting program will help participants build community and create a sense of place that will live on long after the paint wears away.

The program originated from a pilot project the City of Regina carried out in 2017 and 2018. The project saw members of the community gather to create a public artwork designed by the Neil Balkwill’s artist Brendan Schick at the crosswalk of 14th Avenue and Montague Street in October 2017.

But seven months — and one winter season — after the first mural was painted, it had faded to nothing. Norman Kyle, director of roadways and transportation for the City of Regina, said the use of a stain (着色剂) instead of a road paint, as well as road use, contributed to the mural’s quick demise. “We had a lot of calls and there were a lot of social media posts that were positive about the mural,” said Kyle. “They wished it would have lasted longer but given the fact that it is on a road with traffic and sand, just like our road markings, we have to refresh them every year to make them visible.”

Citizens will be able to send proposals outlining what kind of mural their group or organization would like to paint and where. City administration will then assess the proposals.

If approved, a flat permit fee of $400 will be required to cover the cost of traffic accommodations (设施) including barricades and parking restrictions needed during painting and after as the paint dries. The permit fee will also cover the cost of reviewing the applications. The applicants will also be required to cover the cost of the paint needed to complete the mural.

“In the pilot project we felt it was successful because there was high community involvement and participation,” said Kyle. “It generated a lot of positive feedback from both the citizens and the community.” He said he hopes community groups will continue to get involved, and as they do that it will spread throughout the city.

Mogao Grottoes is located at the western end of the Hexi Corridor along the ancient Silk Road in Dunhuang, China. Until now, most mural paintings at Mogao Grottoes have been dated by directly referring to the mural texts or historical documents. However, some are still left with the creation era (年代) uncertain due to the lack of reference materials or the disagreement of art experts.

The drawing style of mural paintings was changing throughout history and can be learned and quantified through painting data. A new dating method has been developed by encoding (编码) the drawing styles using visual codes learned through deep learning. This new method successfully discovered the creation era of six mural paintings at Mogao Grottoes. This new research work is led by Qingquan Li from Shenzhen University.

With the help of experts from Dunhuang Academy, seven mural paintings from two grottoes (No. 205 and No. 206) were chosen as subjects for this dating research.

To reveal the creation era of these paintings, Qin Zou, a researcher from Wuhan University, collected 3,860 mural paintings from 194 different grottoes with confirmed creation-era labels. To find the visual codes that can identify the era in these paintings, the authors constructed a deep convolutional neural network (卷积神经网络) and classified (将……分类) these painting images into the right eras. Based on the classification model, a dating method was built and applied to date the seven paintings.

Six of the new dating results were approved by experts from Dunhuang Academy. “These dating results are correct and the method is great,” said Mr. Hui-Min Wang, a distinguished expert from the Archaeological Institute of Dunhuang Academy.

“To the best of our knowledge,” wrote the researchers, “this work represents the first account of a scientific and quantitative manner to support the era prediction and reduce the uncertainties in dating ancient paintings by using deep learning.”