This exhibition features 72 exquisite traditional Chinese paintings by the renowned artist Liu Zhong, focusing on themes related to pandas and other animals. More than 40 of these works were specially created by Liu Zhong for the "Building a Happy Hong Kong" initiative. Liu Zhong stated that animals are friends of humanity, and only through harmonious coexistence can pandas thrive on Earth. He has expressed his intention to donate all the exhibited works to various universities and youth service organizations in Hong Kong, thereby broadly calling on all sectors of society to pay attention to ecological and animal protection.
Liu Zhong, born in 1969 in Beijing, holds a Master's degree in Visual Arts from the French Ministry of Education and a Bachelor's degree in French from the French Ministry of Education. He is a council member of the China Artists Association and currently serves as the Director of the External Liaison Department of the China Artists Association and the Deputy Secretary-General of the Chinese Painting Association. With over forty years of artistic journey, his diverse artistic accumulation and increasingly rich life experiences have given him a mature perspective on the animals he depicts. The lovely creatures, often driven out of sight by modern civilization, fill his works with a sense of affinity and profound love. The reporter observed in the exhibition hall those spiritually rich and intricately detailed animal images, with the adorable pandas leading their companions, enjoying the boundless space created by the artist's brush, expressing the harmonious relationship between animals and nature, and between nature and humanity. The panda, a unique national treasure of China, evokes affection and admiration. It represents China and symbolizes world peace. The President of the Hong Kong Artists Association, Xiao Huirong, praised Liu Zhong for using the unique Chinese element of the panda to create an artistic world that is both pastoral and natural, while inheriting and developing the artistic language of traditional Chinese painting, thus bridging the gap between Eastern and Western art and conveying the modern artistic atmosphere and humanistic spirit of contemporary China to the world.
Wang Jiaxin, Vice President of the Beijing Artists Association, holds Liu Zhong in high regard, stating that Liu Zhong's paintings are "exaggerated yet reasonable, harmonious yet seamless, figurative yet metaphorical, natural and ordinary, grand yet unpretentious, neither arrogant nor timid." Liu Zhong captures the essence of all things with an ordinary brush and a calm heart, avoiding pretentiousness and not pursuing the bizarre or the overly mature that does not match his age and experience.
Liu Dawei, President of the China Artists Association, specially wrote the exhibition title and preface to express his recognition and congratulations for the exhibition. In the preface, he wrote: Young Liu Zhong was praised as an artistic "prodigy," and now Liu Zhong is a world-renowned "animal painter." His works are filled with a sense of affinity and profound love. After a brief nostalgia, one may fall into contemplation, reading a sense of compassion, and in that compassion, seeing a beam of love and hope. The harmony in his paintings carries an ironic significance, thus possessing strong shock and inspiration. He interprets the spiritual fairy tale of contemporary urban dwellers with an unquenched childlike heart, using innovative Chinese brushwork to bring his pandas to one international stage after another, telling the beautiful "Chinese Dream" through the universally beloved "world language" of the panda.
