Published on: 2026-08-24
Source: People’s Republic of China — Translation
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Hangzhou, August 24 /Xinhua/ — In the southwest of Hangzhou, the administrative center of Zhejiang Province /Eastern China/, there is an exhibition pavilion that attracts many visitors. Among them are not only professionals in the field of fine arts, but also ordinary residents and guests of the city. This is the Quanshanshi Art Center.
This community-beneficial art center was opened in 2014 at the initiative of the Chinese artist Quan Shanshi, who is now 96 years old. It is worth noting that the center specially opened a hall for showcasing outstanding works of contemporary Russian artists, and exhibitions of Russian painters’ works are held here every year.
Speaking at the opening ceremony of the exhibition of works by teachers and students of the Ilya Repin St. Petersburg Academy of Arts, held in April of this year in the city of Hangzhou, the rector of the Ilya Repin St. Petersburg Academy of Arts, Semyon Mikhaylovsky, noted that wonderful Chinese artists studied at the academy as early as the 1950s. Quan Shanshi was one of them.
An elderly professor at the Chinese Academy of Arts, whose Russian name is Sasha, similar in pronunciation to his Chinese name, studied for 6 years at the mentioned celebrated Russian Academy of Arts. “This experience has brought me great benefit in life,” he said with a smile.
In 1954, Quan Shanshi, working as a painting instructor at an institute that preceded the China Academy of Art, came to Leningrad along with several Chinese students to study oil painting.
“At that time, we had already obtained higher education in China and were supposed to enter graduate school, but we decided to start studying from the first year of undergraduate studies in the USSR to solidify the foundation of our knowledge and skills,” the artist said.
“From the first to the fifth year, we had to attend two-hour contour drawing classes every morning; from the first to the third year, in the afternoons, there were classes on artistic anatomy and perspective drawing; and in the evenings, we had sketching classes,” he recalled, adding that very strict demands were made of them during their studies, which greatly helped him in his artistic creativity.
In 1960, Quan Shanshi, who also overcame significant difficulties in learning Russian through great effort, graduated with honors and received a red diploma. “The 6-year study in the Soviet Union allowed me not only to see a large number of original European paintings, including Russian ones, for the first time, but also to understand that oil painting has its own unique language.”
According to Quan Shanshi, in the work of the renowned artist Andrey Andreyevich Mylnikov, who was his academic advisor, special attention is paid to both realism and the expression of emotions, which had a great impact on him.
For more than 60 years, Quan Shanshi has been teaching oil painting. He headed the oil painting department at the China Academy of Art and served as the deputy head of the China Oil Painting Society. According to him, his fellow Chinese students who studied with him in the Soviet Union also became pillars of higher art education in China upon returning home and nurtured many talents in the field of fine arts.
For many years, Quan Shanshi has also been engaged in translation work, collecting the works of Russian artists for their publication in China. At the opening ceremony of the above-mentioned exhibition, he was awarded a medal dedicated to the 260th anniversary of the Ilya Repin St. Petersburg Academy of Arts for his outstanding contribution.
At present, the Quan Shanshi Art Center also regularly holds educational courses on aesthetic education for teenagers. Seeing students in the exhibition hall, Quan Shanshi often recalls how Soviet schoolchildren regularly visited museums to learn about important buildings, find out who their architects were, and understand the beauty of architecture. “I also want to contribute to the cause of universal aesthetic education in China,” he said.
“I hope that, acting as a bridge, I can tell young people about what I have learned in Russia and introduce the residents of China to wonderful works of Russian art, and in this way, through my efforts, contribute to promoting exchanges in the fields of art and education between China and Russia,” Quan Shanshi concluded.
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