Project to artistically record China's achievements bears fruit

From late 2017 to earlier this year, more than 140 artists from across the country attended five separate seminars in Beijing and Hangzhou, Zhejiang province.

Their number included little-known career artists and noted figures who also teach at art schools. They were enrolled into the seminars as part of a national project launched by the Ministry of Culture and Tourism in 2016, under which they were tasked with producing themed, realistic paintings and sculptures that reflect China's social, economic and cultural accomplishments over the course of the four decades of reform and opening-up. A total of 134 works had been completed by early this month, the ministry recently announced in Beijing.

Zhou Zongkai, an animation artist and professor of Sichuan Fine Arts Institute in Chongqing, was among dozens of attendees at the seminar held at China Academy of Art in Hangzhou. Zhou, who says he has been passionate about wildlife since his youth and has largely centered his artwork on environmental subjects, conceived an oil painting to address the national initiative of the ecological protection of Sanjiangyuan, the nature reserve in Qinghai province, which is the source of China's three great rivers - the Yellow River, the Yangtze River and the Lancang River.