A retrospective show chronicling the career of Chinese master painter and art educator Huang Binhong (1865-1955) will be on display in August at the China National Art Museum.

In addition there will be an art exhibition of prize-winning works for the First Huang Binhong Art Awards, and an international symposium on Huang's artistic achievements and his contributions to art education in China.

Jointly sponsored by the China National Art Museum, the Zhejiang Provincial Art Museum and the Academy of Chinese Art Research, the retrospective show will display at least 100 original Chinese ink painting by the art guru.

Huang founded the Fine Arts Research Institute of the academy in 1953, according to Long Rui, director of the institute.

The two-day symposium is expected to be attended by about 50 professors, critics, and historians of art from a number of regions including Hong Kong, Taiwan and Macao, and countries including Japan, the Republic of Korea, Malaysia, Australia, France, Canada and the United States, organizers said.

The exhibition of prize-winning works from the First Huang Binhong Art Awards will feature at least 80 selected works by today's most promising young and middle-aged artists of traditional Chinese painting.

A 29-member panel of judges led by art historian Wang Zhaowen, Zhang Ding and Wang Bomin will select the final winners of the awards.

Huang was widely recognized as a master of traditional Chinese painting, equalled only by other masters such as Qi Baishi (1864-1957) and Zhang Daqian (1899-1983), said Liang Jiang, a veteran art historian with the Academy of Chinese Art Research.

Huang was also an expert in epigraphy and philology, ancient Chinese art history, traditional Chinese poetry, Chinese calligraphy, and the study of ancient Chinese literature.

Huang first worked as a local official for the late Qing Dynasty (1644-1911) in Jinhua of East China's Zhejiang.

He later became a revolutionary activist around 1900 and fled to Shanghai in 1907, working first as a journalist and then as an art teacher.

He went on to teach art in Beijing in 1937, and in 1948 moved back to his home province of Zhejiang, teaching in the National Art School which later was expanded into today's China Academy of Fine Arts in Hangzhou, capital of Zhejiang Province.

After the founding of the People's Republic of China in 1949, Huang taught art in Beijing and Hangzhou.

Huang once acted as an art adviser to late Chinese leader Mao Zedong.

Huang passed away on March 15, 1955.

While bedridden with illness, he elected to donate his collection of some 2,000 ancient Chinese art works and at least 5,000 works of calligraphy and paintings he had created and kept for himself for years to the Zhejiang Provincial Art Museum.

Fruitful in art theories and active in artistic practices, Huang has had a tremendous influence on the modern Chinese art scene. He left behind an army of prominent "disciples" including such famous people as Guo Weiqu, Lin Sanzhi, Li Keran and Wang Bomin who are all highly acclaimed artists in their own right.

(China Daily February 16, 2004)