Colorful Sanxingdui|a combination of freehand and realistic brushwork

The Bronze Mask, Bronze Sacred Tree, Bronze Sacred Bird... Yao Yehong endowed these cultural relics with a new life with his paintbrush.

Yao Yehong, vice president of the Sichuan Artists Association,expressed his enthusiasm about Sanxingdui's cultural relics: "I am intrigued by Sanxingdui's cultural relics because they reflect the wisdom of the ancients, and arouse ourinterest in the level of scientific and technological developmentat that time!" He added that from an aesthetic perspective, the shapes of Sanxingdui's cultural relics, includingfigures of clairvoyance and clairaudience, were exaggerated and full of imagination, which could only be the product of an economy and technology that were highlydeveloped.

Yao Yehong studied landscape painting under Cen Xuegong, pioneer of the 'Three Gorges Painting School', since 1983. His works have been displayed in art museums in Beijing, Shanghai, Shandong, Hainan, and Sichuan, and he has held personal exhibitions in Japan, Singapore, and the United States. His published works includeYao Yehong's Chinese Painting Collection, Yao Yehong's Landscape Scroll, and Rongbaozhai Painting Copybook: Yao Yehong's Landscape Paintings.

His works are mainly landscape paintings because he thinks he can demonstrate Chinese landscapes' strength and majesty, which are qualities he believes match his own personality. Yao Yehong told us: "As an artist, I also think that the exaggerated expression of Sanxingdui's cultural relics is unimaginable and extremely groundbreaking." "Chinese painting stresses the combination of freehand and realistic brushwork, and I think Sanxingdui's cultural relics' shapes are also a perfect combination of the two styles." Yao Yehong said. In addition, he also shared with us his re-creation ideas. He selected three representative Sanxingdui cultural relics and used a variety of Chinese painting expression techniques to render and depict them in a picture, which enabled him to make use of his freehand painting skills to precisely capture the essence of these cultural relics.

Yao Yehong told us: "Even though thousands of years have passed, some cultural relics unearthed at Sanxingdui still retain some of their original colors." From his point of view, since the ancients were fastidious about colors and utilized a lot of mineral pigments, including cyanine and cinnabar, the original Sanxingdui cultural relics must be richly colorful. He added that this suggested an affinity with Chinese landscape paintings because both Sanxingdui cultural relics and Chinese landscape paintings took colors from nature, and such colors never faded.