The People's Fine Arts Publishing House has published an album entitled Collections of Contemporary Chinese Master Painter Chao Hai last month.

The 200-page album contains 180 of the 50-year-old artist's selected "boneless ink paintings" that mainly feature imposing but symbolic portrayals of rural people in North China.

Due to his distinctive artistic achievements, Chao has become the youngest living Chinese painter to be included in the Contemporary Chinese Master Painter series, a great honor in the eyes of Chinese artists.

Chao, a professor with Xi'an Academy of Fine Arts, is widely acclaimed for his unique ink paintings that inject a new vitality into jimo, or accumulative brushwork, a traditional Chinese ink painting technique.

Based on extensive observations, Chao, from a farmer's family in northwest China's Shaanxi Province, has spent about two decades developing his own style which is characterized by seemingly boneless brushstrokes and ink dots and an imposing sense of volume in his paintings, that vividly depict rural Chinese people in their living environment.

(China Daily September 23, 2005)