Apainter addicted to his paintings Facets of China(Ⅶ)

An art aficionado looking for Ye Xue might have a hard time finding him. Unless he hires a car and driver, the journey involves taking the subway, a change of buses, plus a healthy hike. Welcome to the outskirts of Tongzhou! The fields lie dry and desolate in the dim autumn sun, and the visitor finds himself walking among the plain brick farmhouses so typical of North China.Beaming his trademark smile, Ye Xue is ready to greet the visitor. Locked away in his courtyard studio he enjoys the peace and quiet that he feels he needs. Spend-     

The Mysterious Forest in Xishuangbanna

Shen Xueren was born in Weifang City,Shandong Province in June 1941.He graduated from the Central Academy of Arts in 1966,and re- ceived a doctor's degree at the United Nations International University. Now,he is a member of the China Artists Association and the Chinese Calligrapher Association,a consultant for the China International Association of Celebrity,the arts and cultural exchange ambassador of the World Peace Foundation,an honorable member of the British Royal Joint Academy of Sciences,a researcher at the Research Center of the World Cultural Arts and an honored painter of the Cultural Market Development Center of the Ministry of Culture. In 1978,Shen created the Flower Painting Association.In the same year,he participated in the setting up of Beijing Painting Shop.In 1980,he created the Research Association of Flower and Bird Paintings together with his friends.In 1999,he set up Shen Xueren Art Gallery and Shen Xueren Art Museum.From 1982 to 2000,he had many art exhibitions in many countries including the U.S.A.,Japan,France,Canada and Singapore.Wu Zuoren,Chairman of China Artists Association,attended the opening ceremony of his exhibition in Beijing.The chairman of the Artists Association hosted his exhibition in France.The Chinese Ambassador in Canada,Yu Chen,hosted his exhibi- tion in Canada. The local TV and newspapers report on his exhibitions,and his artwork is collected by embassies and museums.He was invited to draw pictures for the National Museum of China,the Great Hall of the People, Xinhua News Agency,the People's Daily and CCTV,and was also invited to the University of Toronto to give lectures on Chinese painting. Shen has won many awards in many countries.These include an award of excellence for international ink paintings held in Japan in 1986, an award of excellence for new in- ternational art exhibitions in 1988 in Japan,the gold medal of the second Chinese Art Competition in 1999,a sil- ver medal in the 2000 World Chinese Art Exhibition,and a special award from the 2001 Beijing International Art Exhibition.In 2007 his artwork was collected by the UN World Peace Foundation and was awarded the World Peace Art Achievement Award. He was given the title World Art Master.     

Chairman Mao''''s Cigar Man

FAN Guorong, aged 84, is known in his hometown as "the Old Cigar Man." The moniker is a fitting one as he has spent most of his life making cigars. In his early teens, Fan served a three-year apprenticeship and became the youngest cigar maker of his time when he started his career in the late 1940s.     

Preface to "Tracking Down the Traes of Gods——Journey to Greece"

"Tracking Down the Traces of Gods-Journey to Greece", a collection of poems written by ChenHaosu, vice-president of the Chinese People's Association for Friendship with Foreign Countries(CPAFFC), was published in Athens in December 1995, when he led a CPAFFC delegation to Greece toattend the Third Europe-China International Conference. This collection of his poems in Chinese waswritten two years ago when he paid his first visit to Greece in September 1993, then translated intoGreek by a friend of his, and polished and edited by Mr.Thiyado Patrikarias, well-known Greek poet.The Greek friends think highly of this Chinese-Greek bilingual collection of poems. Mr Patrikariassaid, "This collection of poems reflects the thrill the poet experiences when his soul touches Greece(both ancient and modern Greece), and it vibrates in each of his poems. This shows that Greece hasfound an understanding friend from China, a great country with a longstanding history and culturaltradition." With the consent of the author,     

Remembering A Reformer

正Commemorating China’s chief architect of reform and opening up inspires latest revisions As a teenager,Zhang Weiying,now a prominent economist and former Dean of the Guanghua School of Management at Peking University,thought he could be nothing more than a farmer like his illiterate parents.In an article written in memory of the year he was admitted to college,Zhang,born in 1959,noted that he spent the first 19 years of life in his hometown,a remote village in China’s northwest Shaanxi Province.As someone     

Charity Online

MAO Lihui, a teacher in a remote mountainous area, changed his deprived students＇ lives with the help of the Internet. The article he wrote on his blog,which included pictures of his pupils in their tattered clothes and often bare feet, aroused public sympathy and prompted an influx of donations.     

LETTERS

The topic of＂dreams＂ reminds me of a text by the late Chinese writer Shi Tiesheng who was paralyzed when he was 21, in whichhe elaborated on his devotion to sports. He loved track and field the most, more than writing, and his favorite star was Carl Lewis whom, with a strong body and super speed, he regarded as the luckiest man on earth. Shi once thought that he would do anything to have Lewis＇ physique and vigor in another life, if there were one. But observ- ing the athlete＇s rise and fall after a doping scandal, he gained fresh understanding of success, happiness and life in general. He said his dream was to have a healthy body, a beautiful soul and life wisdom. While acknowledging that many think one should not be too greedy or ambitious, Shi＇s overriding belief was that everyone has the right to dream big, and to look forward to the best in the world.     

Henore de Balzac, an Ever-Burning Torch

We are gathered here todayto commemorate the greatFrench writer Henore de Balzac.He was born on May 20, 1799and died on August 18, 1850. Itwill be the bicentenary of his birthin a month and the 150th anniver-sary of his death in a year.Balzac was a master of criti-cal realism. In the relatively shorttime of 50 years of his life, he leftus The Human Comedy, an ex-traordinary and exceptional real-istic literary work consisting of 94novels. Just as he had expected,     

Chairman Mao＇s Cigar Man

FAN Guorong, aged 84,is known in his hometown as “the Old CigarMan.” The moniker isa fitting one as he has spent most of his life making cigars. In his early teens, Fan served a three-year apprenticeship and became the youngest cigar maker of his time when he started his career in the late 1940s.     

Art and Money：Selling Out in Xiaozhou

XIAOZHOU Village on the southern outskirts of Guangzhou is a place of boundless opportunity - at least for Liu Jiusheng and Xie Guozheng. Liu opened his guqin （ancient zither） workshop in the village in 2007. He loves the guqin and is a skilled player. Once he bought an old one and disassembled it, finding its construction not as complicated as he had imagined. At that moment, he was struck by the impulse to make his own zithers of superb quality, and hired 26-year-old carpenter Xie to help him realize the dream.     

Teen Athlete Training- No Mean Feat

"I really admire Li Xiaopeng," says 14-year-old Yang Rui fervently and with a rapt smile, despite the pain of his ankle injury. Yang, a member of the Chinese National Gymnastic Team, injured his ankle a few days ago while training. Until he recovers he must be content to sit on a bench in the SGAS Training Bureau's new gymnasium and watch his teammates train.     

Tide of Change

Li Zhengde regards the Yangtze River as the highway of his youth.Born in a small town in south China's Hunan Province,Li grew up near the Zijiang River, a tributary of the Yangtze,and in 1976, boats were the major mode of transport there.In the 1990s,he had to take a year off from school due to illness and sailed to nearby Wuhan Province on his cousin's wooden junk,It was his first trip outside Hunan and the one-month sailing experience is etched indelibly in his mind.     

Flying on the melody

Kong Xiangdong is one of the most successful young pianists in the world. He loves the piano, he loves his homeland. Therefore, he became the best pianist of the Yellow River Piano concerto.The first time I became aware of the young pianist, was when I read the story of Kong Xiangdong and his teacher in a     

Million dollar baby

F rankle Dunn (Clint Eastwood) has trained and managed some incredible fighters during a life time spent in the ring. He is a professional boxing trainer and owner of The Hit Pit, an old-school boxing gym nestled in the gritty heart of downtown Los Angeles. The Hit Pit is Frankie's life, and he divides his time between the seemingly disparate activities of training fighters and attending mass -which he has done almost every day for the past 23 years. Unable to forgive himself for becoming estranged from his daughter long ago, he sends her a letter every week, and the     

A Note of Friendship

Seventy-four years after he died, Chinese composer Xian Xinghai is touching hearts again, this time through a film made on the tragic last years of his life that hit the screens in China and Kazakhstan in May. Chinese director Xinzat Yahup's biopic The Composer, the first China-Kazakh coproduction, shines a light on the man regarded as one of the greatest Chinese composers, who was forced by circumstances to spend his last years in Kazakhstan and Russia, where he took his last breath.     

James Endicott and His Life in China

J ames Endicott was born in Sichuan Province, China in 1898. He was the first son of a Ca-nadian Missionary. As a well-known social activ-ist, he devoted his whole life to the people-to-peo-ple friendship between Canada and China. James spent his childhood in Chengdu, an oldand peaceful city of Sichuan. His memory ofChengdu was full of beautiful dreams and happi-ness. He was a spirited child and delighted in fly-ing kites. One of his kites was like a dragon, 40feet long. When it …     

Tudeng Kezhu:Professor from“Roof of the World”

It was in March 2003. I had the honor to meet a Tibetan young man coming from the snow-capped plateau. Slim and tall, he looked delicate and easy in manners. Wearing a pair of glasses, his eyes were bright and shining. Born in a pasture in the Qamdo area of Tibet, he speaks fluent Han language, revealing that he received higher education in the Han-inhabited area. He is Tudeng Kezhu, now serving as the deputy dean and associate professor of the Economics Department of Tibet University in Lhasa and came to Beijing for the first session of the 10th National Committee of the Chinese People's Political Consultative Conference (CPPCC).     

Wolf Totem

PUBLISHED in April 2004 and a hit at Chinese bookstores,Wolf Totem is the touching tale of young man from Bei-jing, his life among herdsmen, and his love for a wolf. It isbased on the personal experience of the author. Jiang Rong, wholived in Inner Mongolia from 1967 to 1978.The story is set in a remote part of Inner Mongolia's vastgrasslands in the late 1960s. The Beijing-born Chen Zhen and agroup of his friends leave their hometown for Inner Mongolia - aland he imagines as mysterio…     

Untiring Pursuit of Art

Wang Fenggang comes from a poor farming family in Shanxi Province. Over the decades he has painstakingly perfected his writing, calligraphy and root carving skills. Today he is a member of the Chinese Calligraphy and Painting