During his trips to Northwest China in the 1990s, the imposing, raw beauty of the region's mountains and rivers took Cheng Dali's breath away.

The innovative landscape painter chose to express those inspiring moments in a different way.

"I found it impossible to express my feelings and reawakened perceptions of human-nature relations through my works of figure paintings and birds-and-flowers paintings," he said. "So, I decided to fully engage myself in exploring my own way of creating Chinese landscape paintings."

Cheng's soul-stirring paintings are now being exhibited in a one-man show at the National Art Museum of China.

"At 60, I feel that my career as a Chinese mountains-and-waters painter has just begun," said the president and editor-in-chief of the prestigious China Fine Arts Publishing Group.

Running until this Friday morning, the exhibition features 52 selected mountains-and-waters (landscape) paintings by Cheng, who has created these works during his spare time since 1999.

"Although he has not received systematic training in any fine arts academy, Cheng is nontheless one of the most influential artists of traditional Chinese mountains-and-waters (landscape) painting today," said veteran art critic Shao Dazhen, at a seminar after the opening ceremony of Cheng's solo show.

"His decades-long devotion to fine arts and his ceaseless attempts to improve his artistic skills have set him apart from many of his contemporaries."

Thanks to his role as an editor and publisher and his voracious appetite for books over the past decades, Cheng has gained a systematic and in-depth understanding of Chinese literature and art and Western art from a historical perspective, commented art critic Xu Peijun.

Intellectual inspiration

The Beijing native spent his early years in Xuzhou of East China's Jiangsu Province. He went to a small village in Peixian County of the province during the "cultural revolution" (1966-76) and spent seven years there as a laborer as tens of millions of Chinese youths did. But in his spare time, he began to read whatever he could get his hands on, plowing through tons of books about both Chinese culture and philosophies, and Western art and philosophies. He often hid himself in a local library that was closed down during those chaotic years.

"I read almost all the books there and that laid a solid foundation for my future career as an editor and artist," Cheng, who never went to university.

In 1971, he began working as a middle school art teacher, and very soon, he became a resident artist at a local culture centre. In the following years, he learned to paint a lot of posters and New Year's paintings for local people. During that time, he found Chinese ink painting to be his favourite art genre.

In 1980, because of his impressive works shown during a local exhibition, he got a job as an art editor for Nanjing-based Jiangsu People's Publishing House. In the following years, Cheng has churned out several award-winning art books and art book series.

In the meantime, he kept his habit of reading extensively and managed to closely watch the latest development of art inside and outside of China in the early 1980s.

He also tried his hands on paintings and writing essays on art and aesthetics. In the mid-1980s, he became the editor-in-chief of Jiangsu Prictorial, a pioneering magazine which helped promote a large number of artists who are well-known today for their innovative approaches, including Zhou Sicong, Xu Bing, Gu Wenda, Liu Xiaodong and Fang Lijun.

In the late 1980s, he got a second role as editor-in-chief of Jiangsu Fine Arts Publishing House where he compiled and published a series of books about traditional Chinese painting, Chinese folk art, and books about contemporary art in China and Western countries.

Since 1998, he has been working for Peoples' Fine Arts Publishing House, now the China Fine Arts Publishing Group, in different posts before he became the editor-in-chief in 2000.

As an art editor, Cheng's best-known works include a 10-volume album "Complete Collections of Chinese Folk and Ethnic Art" and a 22-volume album entitled "Art of the Dunhuang Mogao Grottoes," both of which won him a string of awards including the National Book Award.

To compile "Art of the Dunhuang Mogao Grottoes," he frequented the grottoes in the 1990s.

Dunhuang as inspiration

"For me, painting is not a painstaking task but a way of self-cultivation," he said. "I paint and continue to do so despite all kinds of setbacks in my life simply because I love to paint and enjoy the creative process."

Cheng's unremitting pursuit of art eventually paid off.

Over the past few years, he has garnered a dozen top awards and prizes in art exhibitions. In 1989, Cheng won the first prize at the Joint Art Exhibition of Chinese and Japanese Ink Paintings. In 1994, 1996 and 1998, he scooped up top awards for ink landscape paintings at the sixth, seventh and eighth China National Fine Arts Exhibition and Competition.

In 2004, he won the first Huang Binhong Award for Distinguished Artist, a fine arts award named after the late Chinese master painter Huang Binhong (1865-1955). Early this year, he won the first prize at the Second Nationwide Exhibition of Chinese Mountains-and-waters Paintings.

Since the late 1980s, Cheng has held many exhibitions at home and abroad and has won over many fans with his unique styles.

Cheng's works are not simple imitations of nature. Rather, they are refined expressions of his inner world and philosophical ideas, critics said.

"Looking at his works, one may find them imposing as a whole with bold use of brushworks and compositions, and at the same time, they are impressive for the minutely done details," said artist and critic Zhou Shaohua. "More importantly, his works often leave one with a lasting impression."

Cheng himself once explained: "Many artists today pay too much attention to the technical aspect of artistic creation. As a result, their 'delicate' and 'attractive' works are full of visual impact and heart-stopping power but lack a soul-stirring inner strength and lingering aftertaste for viewers."

It is necessary for artists to make innovations and experiments, but these efforts may not always yield good results in new art genres or art works of higher quality, Cheng said.

In veteran art critic Zhai Mo's view, "Cheng is both an ardent admirer of traditional Chinese aesthetics and values and a shrewd observer of current trends in the art scene at home and abroad."

However, Cheng is neither copying older styles nor following his contemporaries, many of whom are drawing from Western art instead of classic Chinese art and culture.

"Rather, the innovative landscape painter has always been trying to forge his own style and his own painting language," Zhai commented.

(China Daily December 13, 2005)