What's on

Heartfelt renderings

The flower-and-bird genre is one of the three major themes of classic Chinese painting. Through the depiction of flowers, plants, birds, insects and other living creatures, artists get to understand the fundamental rules of nature, the beauty and spirituality of it and imbue the subjects under their brushes with good qualities and morals, as well as the wishes and ambitions in their hearts.

Beauty is in the Heart, an ongoing exhibition at the National Art Museum of China, shows 13 flower-and-bird paintings by reputed artists drawn from its collection and runs through to Jan 2.

Featured artists include Wang Xuetao, who is known for his meticulous brushwork and vibrant and graceful color arrangement, Lin Fengmian, who was among the first Chinese to study art in Europe in the early 20th century and was able to blend the artistic temperaments of the East and the West in his work, and Xu Beihong, who drew animals to bring hope and courage to his people.

9 am-5 pm, closed on Mondays. 1 Wusi Dajie, Dongcheng district, Beijing. 010-6400-1476.

A broader picture

Guanghua Lu is a road that runs east to west through the heart of Guomao, the bustling Central Business District in Beijing. Decades ago, when it was much less crowded and commercial, it was where the Academy of Arts and Design, Tsinghua University, located.

Among the students who were enrolled at the academy 40 years ago were Yu Huijian, Ma Quan, Zhang Dali and Yuan Jia.

Now the four alumni are jointly showing their works at Hatched From Guanghua Road, an exhibition running until Feb 29 at Tsinghua University Art Museum, which faces the academy in its current location on the Tsinghua campus. It shows their respective experiments in establishing their own distinctive approaches to art, which have ensured them of their positions of prominence in Chinese art circles. Although presenting different styles, the four of them all work to show the education philosophy of their teacher, Yuan Yunfu, a noted artist and educator who asserted that art students should not confine themselves to the mastery of techniques. He said they should also expand their knowledge and vision of the world, so that they would work to keep pace with the time and to truly address people's concerns.

9 am-5 pm, closed on Mondays. Tsinghua University, Haidian district, Beijing. 010-6278-1012.

That inking feeling

Zhao Zhiqian is considered a leading figure in the reform of China's ink tradition in the 19th century, promoting it to a new realm. He created a new style of calligraphy, which was grounded in his profound studies of the Yan style, named after the exponent calligrapher Yan Zhenqing of the eighth century, and the writings engraved on stone tablets dated to the Northern Wei Dynasty (386-534).

Zhao also incorporated the techniques of calligraphic brushwork into the creation of Chinese painting, especially the flower-and-bird genre that he specialized in. Experiencing many hardships in his lifetime, Zhao never gave up on expanding the boundaries of Chinese ink art, through his endeavors to be a consummate artist himself. Zhejiang Art Museum has mounted an exhibition dedicated to Zhao's accomplishments in ink, Luminous and Carefree, running through to March 3, in Hangzhou, the provincial capital, where Zhao, a native of the neighboring city Shaoxing, lived his final years. The exhibition gathers collections from a dozen museums and cultural institutions.

It is a survey of the social and cultural contexts in which Zhao was brought up, and which helped shape his takes on life and art. When learning from those historic figures who kept enriching the ink tradition, he was inspired to add new dimensions to it to carry on its cultural lineage.

9 am-5 pm, closed on Mondays. 138 Nanshan Lu, Hangzhou, Zhejiang province. 0571-8707-8700.

China Daily