With pencil and brush, he is painting also with conscience, and his work turns out to be a perfect marriage of realism and personal approach. Mr. Wang Jiangyang, a Yi ethnic Chinese painter in his 50s, is noted for his idealized pastoral subjects and scenes of peasant farmers. For this, he is dubbed by critics as 'China's Millet.'

Born and bred in a mountainous village in the Chinese southwestern Sichuan Province, the self-educated painter is quite acquainted with the seemingly eternal theme running through the peasant farmers' daily life—unending and backbreaking labor—in a relatively remote place where the struggle to survive invariably takes place. During his years of preparatory work to unfold his pastoral theme on the canvas, Mr. Wang had to contemplate how to best convey the sense of repetition and fatigue in the peasant's daily life, while giving each of his figures a noble and monumental strength.

As far back as 1980s, Mr. Wang set out to bridge the gap between the grassroots life and the highbrow art. The essence of aesthetics, he maintains, can be brought out by the peasants' daily struggle against all kinds of hardships. And as he always puts it, 'rural life in itself has such a peculiar fascination that it is virtually a primitive form of artistic expression; the Chinese peasants, humble as they may be, deserve love and respect, for the simple reason that they never bow to difficult circumstances.'

When conversing with Wang Jiangyang, one can easily find he never has to be prompted to relate his favorite topic of the Chinese peasant farmers, the group to which he insists he rightly belong and is sentimentally attached. Even the lines and composition of his paintings can remind people of both the vicissitudes he has experienced living as a destitute peasant farmer and the courage and perseverance in seeking after joys after shedding sweat and tears. Figures depicted in Wang's paintings are such that they could be deprived of the best that life can offer but they will still cherish the hope that one day they will be amply rewarded, as shown in paintings by the unswerving look in their eyes and their unceasing passion for beauty and pleasure.

Mr. Wang believes that Mood is not only the spirit of a work of art but more a portrayal true to life and a painter's mentality. That is why he always half- jokingly says to his students that a good painter is born to be so; and anyone can be a good painter, if he has love-- that love can be as insignificant as, say, you love a drop of water, a handful of sand and a clump of bushes. 'The last thing a good painting requires is techniques. What is paramount to a painter before he sets pencil to canvas is the love he is going to devote to his work,' Wang Jiangyang said in his lecture on aesthetics in realist paintings.

It seems that Mr. Wang has no interest in finding a decided position for his paintings as many famous painters are anxious to do. In actuality, he cares little about what category or school his paintings are supposed to fall into. 'One thing is certain that I am a hundred percent not a college-trained painter,' he beamed, gazing at an unfinished painting—a portrait of his beloved mother, who painlessly passed away at 97 in an armchair outside the makeshift tent on the heels of the massive Sichuan earthquake.

Some critics try to put his work into the class of naturalism, some think he is just a portrait painter, but more others tend to deem his work carries an intense air of realist paintings. Wang Jiangyang, however, said nothing about his own painting style, and still pays little attention to debates aroused by the latest exhibition of his paintings held in China's Art Gallery. 'I just speak out of my mind using my paintings, and I have sentiments for the figures I have portrayed,' he said in a soft but distinct Sichuan dialect, and the sentiments are echoed by those who have seen his paintings.