Chinese contemporary artists Zeng Fanzhi and Shi Cong are big names and command high prices, but the man who taught them is little known, though quite distinguished, utterly confident and just 45 years old.

Professor Fang Shaohua enjoys a revered position in China's art hierarchy because of his students, especially Zeng, who is about 43.

Fang himself is low key but not unaware of his own talent. "I have always known I am a genius in art," says oil painter Fang who is currently holding a solo exhibition at Shanghai Art Museum.

Titled "In Search of Harmless Apples for the Garden of Eden," the exhibit of 50 works is a retrospective of Fang's paintings over the past decade.

"I am really proud of their achievement," he says of Zeng and Shi, "and I am proud to be introduced by them to others as their teacher."

He taught them at the Hubei Art Institute, and now teaches in Guangzhou. He notes that he is "only two years older" than Zeng adding he was just 21 when he graduated from the Hubei Art Institute.

The exhibit's highlight is "Learning Love from Harmless Apples," a two-meter-high art piece picturing Adam and Eve standing under an apple tree within a vast greenhouse filled with bio-tech apple trees.

Eve hands Adam an apple while the serpent looks on. The towering greenhouse suggests high-tech agriculture and bioscience that produced an orchard of trees of knowledge of good and evil. It also suggests the bewildering choices and possibilities of misuse of technology. The artist clearly believes harmless apples are in short supply. The whole picture is streaked with white dashes of rain, a device also favored by Fang's famous student, Zeng.

Many of Fang's works about the environment feature this "rain" and in many he paints a hand holding an umbrella to protect the contents of his canvas from the dangers of progress. In many canvases the subjects are framed by arches or gates in Chinese red, emphasizing the problem in China.

"I try to reflect the series of heavy costs paid by China for its rapid economic development," says Fang. "One of the greatest costs is the rapid expansion of materialism. In fact, this is a universal problem. Whether in China or in foreign countries, traditional codes of conduct, ethics, morality and religion are weakening."

His paintings include series like "Protection Against Humidity" and "Warning: Rising Sea Levels," framed by dark red arches.

Born in Hubei's Shanshi city in 1962, Fang had a lot of free time as a little boy during the "cultural revolution" (1966-76). Since routines were disrupted and students didn't go to school, they followed the waves of the campaigns every day. "When the old gypsum sculptures (of out-of-favor figures) were torn down and broken up, I was busy with the other boys using the broken pieces as chalk to draw caricatures of the teachers on the walls," he recalls.

These days he is a confident artist and teacher, dismissive of "chaotic trends" in Chinese art, extolling the importance of technique and serious ideas.

In 1995, Fang transformed and reinterpreted some classical works of Manet and Ingres by introducing modern elements. For example, discarded plastic lunch boxes can be seen in Manet's "Picnic," which Fang calls "Fast Food on the Grass."

"I don't like creating political symbols or icons to cater to Western collectors," he says. "I prefer to paint something that is close to my present living environment."

By the end of 2007, Fang had completed two huge paintings including "We Are All Sunflowers," nine by two meters in size. Fang was inspired by an old song which compares Chairman Mao Zedong to the sun and the Chinese people to his sunflowers.

Nostalgia also inspired other works of "people's hero'' Lei Feng and action star Bruce Lee.

In his "Invisible Frog Prince" Fang packs up his symbolic and metaphoric language and performs with only colors and lines on a canvas over four meters long. The frog's lily or lotus pond lies in the distance. The foreground is filled with green and pink blossoms - streaked by rain.

"Fang Shaohua's talent is a gift. It's not only the skills for composing a complicated painting with ease, but also his remarkable control and instinctive sense of painting expression," says Huang Zhuan, the show's curator.

Fang observes: "Today there are too many chaotic concepts in the Chinese contemporary art scene. I hope visitors can appreciate the beauty of technique and the more profound thinking of the artist through this show."

Date: through January 21, 9am-5pm

Address: 325 Nanjing Rd W.

Admission: 20 yuan

Tel: 021-6327-2829

(Shanghai Daily January 17, 2008)