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Painting show to celebrate 50th Anniversary of Tongchuan
By Ge Lin (chinadaily.com.cn)
Updated: 2008-10-21 16:12

Visitors to Tongchuan, Shaanxi Province, are impressed with the painting exhibition of Deng Shuangsheng, a 70-year-old artist in the city.

On display in the exhibition are more than 70 vivid and true-to-life paintings of tigers, birds and flowers. Visitors admire Deng’s works because he has distinguished himself as a self-taught artist.

Guo, who had worked for nearly 40 years in the local coal company when he retired in 1999, is a great lover of art. After work, he would practice painting and calligraphy and became famous in the fields in the city.

“All the works on display have been done by me in the past year as gifts to the 50th anniversary of Tongchuan,” he said.

Tongchuan celebrated its 50th anniversary of becoming a city this month.

In 1958 when Tongchuan, a small mountainous county, was upgraded to the city status, it covered only 2 square kilometers. Now it covers 3,882 square kilometers and has been developed into a city whose pillar industries are coal, building materials, aluminum and ceramics. It is an important industrial base for energy and raw materials of West China.

Despite its booming industrial development, visitors to Tongchuan are attracted by its clean streets, green lawns and beautiful flower parterres.

“Ten years ago, however, Tongchuan was polluted so seriously that it was said to be a blind spot in satellite,” locals said with a touch of humuor.

With more than ten years’ alteration, the percentage of forest-crop is 43.9% in today’s Tongchuan and the days in which the quality of air is better than grade 2 come up to 296 days, according to Wu Qianjin, the city’s Party chief.