The China National Art Museum turned into an "opera house" this week.

From Tuesday through Sunday, almost all famous arias of Peking Opera will be staged in the country's top venue of contemporary art.

Among the household names are "The Drunken Beauty," "Farewell to My Concubine," "Zhong Kui Fights Ghost," and "The Orphan of the Zhao Family."

What makes the event more peculiar is all the characters show up at the same time in the same hall.

In his solo exhibition, Shanghai artist Liu Linghua, 38, has attempted to represent the indigenous Chinese images of Peking Opera with a primarily Western approach: oil on canvas.

Immersed with the typical Peking Opera melody played in the hall, visitors strolling around the 50-plus oil paintings will naturally be overwhelmed by the passion and charm of a most glorious Chinese tradition.

"I feel I was sitting in an opera house, swaying my head to the tune," said Han Ming, a Beijing art researcher. "It's not only the music, the images and some costumes on display that impressed me. There is something deeper that is related to culture."

Boasting more than 200 years of history, Peking Opera has enjoyed great popularity among Chinese people. As a symbol of traditional Chinese culture, the art has also been admired by many foreigners.

But, at the same time, the precious traditional art is struggling to survive in an increasingly commercialized Chinese society, in spite of efforts to invigorate it by the government and ordinary fans.

Experts say Liu's work is a perceptive attempt to tap the rich resources of this cultural heritage in a modern age and, as a result, add new inspirations to the world art of oil painting.

According to the artist, he has been interested in Peking Opera since childhood and has begun to touch the subject in his painting around eight years ago.

"But it was only until two years ago when I moved to Shanghai as a full-time artist that I developed the idea to focus on painting Peking Opera with an oil brush," said the long-haired painter, a graduate and former teacher from the Xi'an Academy of Fine Arts in his birthplace of Northwest China's Shaanxi Province.

Liu said he is happy to have found this new artistic direction in the cosmopolitan Shanghai, famous for its cultural openness and international art industry.

"The city and the subject suit me well," the artist said. "I feel I will have a lot more to express with my oil brush here."

Even though Liu has only explored this field for a short time, he has already stood out due to his highly personal style, remarked Zhu Guorong, vice-chairman of the Shanghai Artists Association, in his preface for Liu's exhibition catalogue.

According to Zhu, before Liu, a few Chinese artists - such as Lin Fengmian, Guan Liang and Han Yu - had tried to paint Peking Opera, primarily with the traditional Chinese art form of ink painting.

Liu is probably the first Chinese artist who has managed to demonstrate the passionate and graceful "original flavour of Peking Opera" with an oil brush, in Zhu's words.

Liu's recent works in the exhibition fall into two distinctive categories.

The first type is more figurative, with apparent influence from the patterns and colours in certain Chinese folk art, such as New Year Pictures.

"The Drunken Beauty" and "The Orphan of the Zhao Family" are vivid representations of two beautiful women figures in the arias.

In the pictures, the delicate, tender brush work in outlining the faces and eyes of the women create sharp contrast to the forceful, casual touches in painting their costumes and movements.

Besides his favourite colours of red and yellow, the artists applied some black and white strokes in the pictures to produce an interesting effect.

However, Liu's most recent work "Zhong Kui Fights Ghost" goes to another extreme reminiscent of Chinese free-hand ink painting and European Expressionist painting.

The work is an expressive portrait of the righteous conqueror of demons and monsters, who might well get angry with the bad deeds of some devils.

The vigorous, dancing strokes of red and yellow portraying the arms and clothing best demonstrate the anger of the fighter of evil, and made the painting almost abstract.

Only his scary face and protruding eyes are faintly recognizable, which are sketched out with a few touches of black, implying seriousness and righteousness in Peking Opera.

Exhibition organizer Gong Yunbiao said: "These images are no longer simply representations of figures on the stage of Peking Opera. They are impressions based on and integrated with the emotions and thoughts of the artist."

Above all, the impressions exactly demonstrate the personalities of the figures and the essence of Peking Opera-a blend of the figurative and the abstract, the passionate and the graceful, the artistic and the ethical.

As an artist of his age, Liu has made a significant step by merging the most symbolic art forms of East and West.

"But this is just the beginning, said Liu. "I hope to develop a maturer artistic expression of my own by painting Peking Opera images in the coming years."

After its debut, Liu's exhibition will be staged at the China Art Exposition in Beijing from August 24-28 and at the Shanghai Art Fair from November 16-20.

(China Daily 08/03/2001)