Brushstroke with verse

Between 2003 and 2019, for example, Wang Mingming, an ink artist and former head of Beijing Fine Art Academy, created a body of such paintings inspired by, and inscribed with, ancient poems written in the style of Chinese calligraphy. It is a statement of one of the rules at the heart of Chinese art, the union of painting, calligraphy and poetry. It is done in the medium-size ceye ("an album of pages") format, a special structure in Chinese painting that allows viewers an intimate feeling when turning every page.

A selection of 100 paintings from this collection of works by Wang is now on show at A Mood Beyond Poetry, an exhibition at Beijing Fine Art Academy through Sunday.

Wang's interest in art was carefully cultivated by his father, a lover of Chinese painting and calligraphy, who was on good terms with prominent Chinese artists of the 20th century. Wang was introduced to such painters to study under their guidance. His childhood paintings were exhibited in the country and abroad, and he was seen as a prodigy.

Wang became a resident artist at Beijing Fine Art Academy, a hub of creation and studies of classical Chinese art, in the late 1970s. Over the decades, he has been in search of the characteristics of Chinese painting to distinguish it from other types of painting-the representations of the mood of ink art and the revival of paintings with a poetic sense-essential to the genre of literati painting that somehow declined over the past century, he says.