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Hu Yanting, a 60-year-old farmer, has a funny side to him.
He belongs to the Frog Comic Art Society, a 23-year-old local
club in Qiuxian County of North China's Hebei Province. The club
consists of some 200 comic and cartoon artists, mostly amateurs
like Hu who make their living as farmers.
When Hu heard one of his comic works was selected for the China
National Comic Art Exhibition 2006, he rushed to the bus station to
book a ticket bound for Beijing.
"Now, here I am at the art show. I can learn some new ideas
about comic art. And I can make more friends with the same interest
as me," said Hu.
The event kicked off on Friday morning, and the National Art
Museum of China was occupied by hundreds of comic artists and their
fans from Beijing and nearby cities.
The arrival of each comic artist at the opening ceremony
attracted attention from fans.
Among them were also five of Hu's fellow club members.
Zhang Aixue is a 33-year-old club member who has successfully
turned himself from a local farmer to a full-time comic and cartoon
artist.
"We never expected that so many people would know about us and
love our works," said Zhang, who has devoted his time and energy to
comic art since he was 11 years old.
The Zikai Cup China National Comic Art Exhibition 2006, held
every two years in Beijing, has been co-sponsored by the Comic and
Cartoon Artists Committee (CCAC) under the Chinese Artists
Association and the Tongxiang people's government in Zhejiang
Province since 1996, according to CCAC vice-director Zhang Yaoning,
also a famed news cartoonist in Beijing.
The art contest and exhibition runs until July 25 before
traveling to East China's Zhejiang Province. It was named after
Feng Zikai (1898-1975), one of the pioneers of modern Chinese comic
and cartooning art, and native son of today's Tongxiang of Zhejiang
Province.
The exhibition features 141 selected comics and cartoons by
Chinese artists from different parts of the country, according to
Zhang.
Aiming to showcase the latest development of Chinese comic art
over the past two to three years, this exhibition "tries to cover
as many diversified types of comic works as possible," Zhang
said.
Among them are the traditional, satirical "caricatures,"
experimental cartoons done with Chinese ink, comic scenes painted
meticulously with oil on canvases, the abstract or conceptual
comics, and the multi-frame, narrative comic strips, and the manga,
or Japanese-style comic books.
The exhibition also includes bronze sculptures rendered in an
exaggerated approach, much like caricatures. There are
funny-looking paper cuttings and comic works combining
computer-aided graphics and digital photos.
All these works will compete for three Golden Monkey Awards, the
top-level honor for Chinese comic artists and cartoonists, to be
announced later this month, Zhang said.
Today, more and more people are using the somewhat vague and
confusing term "dongman" to cover both comical graphics
(traditionally called "manhua") and animation/cartoon movies
(traditionally called "donghua" in Chinese).
But no matter what it is called, "over the past few years, comic
art has developed into an art genre extremely popular among Chinese
viewers especially the teenagers," said Zhang, who is also a panel
judge for the contest portion of the event.
Although viewers familiar with Chinese comic art scene may find
many established comic artists such as Fang Cheng and Miao Yintang,
the exhibition "actually serves as an arena for innovative comic
artists who are still striving to find their own voices," pointed
out Xia Dachuan, secretary-general of the organizing committee of
the exhibition.
The contestants for the art exhibition are aged from 20 and
90.
The oldest comic artist participating in the show is Jiang
Yousheng, a 90-year-old from Beijing. His humorous piece entitled
"Geomancer Decides Which House to Buy" touches on the
irregularities in the Chinese capital's real estate market.
The youngest participant is Sun Yuanwei, 20, from the Inner
Mongolia Autonomous Region. His popular multi-frame comics entitled
"Xiao Buding Series" is about a Chinese Harry Potter-type boy and
his unusual experiences in a magical world.
Young as he is, Sun has been running a small comics company and
has published 12 comic books over the past three years.
Sun enjoys an increasing fan base which communicates with him
through his personal website, www.0905.com.cn.
"Among my loyal fans are not only primary school pupils, junior
middle school students but also young mums who read my books while
nursing their babies," Sun said.
But he revealed that his ultimate goal is not just to make money
from comic books but to establish his own brand and entertainment
empire, like the Walt Disney Company or Warner Brothers.
Sun is one example of the younger generation of Chinese comic
artists who are ambitious to push forward their genre, pointed out
Wu Jianjun, a veteran comic artist in Beijing.
Chinese comic artists, with a strong sense of national pride,
are unwilling to see millions of Chinese teenage readers sticking
obsessively to comic books from Japan and South Korea, two more
mature markets for comic art and industry, said Xia Dachuan.
The 37-year-old artist has won more than 50 international awards
for comics and cartoon works since 1994.
He is called by some critics as one of the few "active, vanguard
comic artists," along with peers Xia Lichuan, Li Haifeng, Xu Tao,
Jin Hui, Liu Hong, Leng Mu and Cai Lian.
But this time, Xia presents the viewers with a different type of
work, portraying a Goddess of Compassion with a thousand arms
standing side by side with a Western-style sculpture of a nymph.
The latter has acquired a pair of arms from the Chinese
goddess.
"With this piece, I am trying to say that Chinese culture is not
a living fossil in the 21st century. Instead, it has a great role
to play to counterbalance the influence of Western civilization,"
Xia explained.
"I believe that only when the East meets the West in a
harmonious fashion, other than collision and conflict, can the
world attain long lasting peace and overall prosperity."
(China Daily July 18, 2006)
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