Eminent artist opens online courses

At the beginning of his first livestream show on Feb 20, Han Meilin, the prominent artist and designer, joked about being a typical zhai nan, a pop-culture buzzword meaning a man who prefers staying at home. Even though, he said, he feels bored sometimes of being homebound in the face of the COVID-19 outbreak.

With time on his hands, Han, 84, who lives in Beijing, has joined in an e-learning boom by opening three painting courses online for children, a venture he had never tried before.

"I hope children, and parents as well, who watch the show, can learn some painting skills and brighten their mood at this moment of difficulty. It is not a bad thing for us," he says.

The courses are an initiative launched by the Han Meilin Art Foundation and 17zuoye.com, an interactive e-learning platform, not only to enrich the curriculum for children, but also to foster the idea of caring for nature and all living creatures.

In the first class at 7:30 pm, on Feb 20, Han, sitting in his studio in Beijing, showed viewers how to utilize combinations of circles and rectangular shapes to draw animals. It lasted about 40 minutes.

Han is best known as the chief designer of Fuwa, the mascot for the 2008 Summer Olympics in Beijing. He is also renowned for creating lively and adorable images of animals in his body of work. He designed the Chinese New Year stamps for 2019 and 2020 which were specially launched by China Post, respectively featuring corresponding zodiac animals, the pig and the rat.

While demonstrating how to paint, Han also discussed how deeply touched he was by the tenacity of different kinds of animals and plants.

"When I visited the Xinjiang Uygur autonomous region years ago, I was moved," he said, "by the diversity of nature such as populus diversifolia trees and how the white camels cope with harsh conditions. I wanted to bow to them, as a gesture of sincerity.

"Their ways of survival deserve people's respect. They are gifts to us from nature, but look at how people have repaid nature for its generosity. We clear forests, slaughter animals and damage their surroundings to meet our greed," he said.

He told his young audience that a true artist knows how to treat all lives on Earth equally.

Figures from the Han Meilin Art Foundation showed that some 3 million people watched the live broadcast on Feb 20, via 17zuoye.com's platform. The course can be reviewed on the foundation's WeChat account and other livestreaming sites.

The other two courses were livestreamed on Feb 27 and on Thursday, during which Han lectured on design and how to paint horses.

Han graduated from the Central Academy of Fine Arts, and taught at Tsinghua University's Academy of Art and Design for years, two of China's leading art schools. He is noted for his productivity. He has four art museums named after him in Hangzhou, Zhejiang province, Beijing, Yinchuan, the Ningxia Hui autonomous region and Yixing, Jiangsu province, displaying his paintings, sculptures and designs.