Beijing Exhibition Captures Magic of Guilin Landscape

Guilin's scenery is peerless in the world, an old saying goes, and Chinese painters living in the Guangxi Zhuang autonomous region capture the beauty of the land in their ink-and-wash paintings.

A just-opened group exhibition of Chinese traditional paintings by 13 accomplished painters from the region continues through Dec 30, displaying more than 50 works.

Artists attending the Dec 24 opening included Huang Gesheng, Yang Shan, Zheng Junli and Wu Xiaodong. Works on display focus on landscapes, birds and flowers, as well as figures.

Highlights of the show are paintings that depict mountains in spring, the well-known Lijiang River mirroring surrounding scenery, and scenes of Zhuang people's houses that have special wood structure to house people and poultry together.

Yang Xiaoyang, president of the China National Academy of Painting, says ink painters from Guangxi have formed a new art style in the past 10 years. It is rooted in the local culture and history, especially the scenery of its mountains and rivers, adds Yang.

Unlike the sharpness and magnificence of landscape paintings often shown by painters from northern China, mountains and rivers by painters from Guangxi are exquisite and pretty, says Wu Xiaodong, one of the painters attending the show.

The group show is part of a series from artists who were born after the founding of New China in 1949 and is an effort to document China's ink painters since then by the China National Academy of Painting.