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Yuan Xikun is good at both wash and oil paintings, who has painted the wash portraits of more than hundred political personages as Schroeder, the Federal Chancellor of Germany, Clinton, the President of the United States, Mandela, the Chairman of the Africa National Congress of South Africa (ANC) and Yeltsin, the President of Russia, etc. Meanwhile he is also good at painting tigers and lions. Wash animal paintings that he had created were once used as gifts by President Jiang Zemin to be presented to the heads of foreign states.
Klaus Stemmer, the Director of the Museumsinsel (Museum island), Berlin, as appraising Mr. Yuan’s oil painting “the Awakening Lion’, said: “Mr. Yuan’s animal paintings are the same as his famous portraits, which are the expression of his soul. Mr. Yuan’s remarkableness lies in his integration of ancient art and contemporary ones. The subjects and technique of his painting roots in the past but his thought faces the future. He ingeniously adapts the spirit of traditional Chinese paintings and the materials of Western oil paintings to his technique of art.”
Yuan Xikun said: “I draw tigers and lions and portray some leaders because one is the spire of food chain in the natural world, the other is outstanding figures of the mankind. Animals in my paintings can show their strength and the beauty of lifelikeness, which is the same as the sports of humanity. Many our sport events like breaststroke and butterfly stroke are mimicked from animals.”
“I liked sports from childhood. I nearly grew up in the rivers of my hometown. At my fifth year in the primary school, I was still a member of the school team. Now I have sent my eleven-year-old son to a sports school to learn swimming. He is now a second grade sportsman already.”
“Loving sports also impelled me to pay close attention to Beijing’s bid for the Olympic Games. Our unsuccessful bid for the Olympic Games in 1993 mainly lay in less enough general national power. Although our conditions are much better for this time, we should keep our psychology as a rule, because the meaning of “bid for the Olympic Games” doesn’t lie in its result but in the process itself and lies in “starting from myself” by everyone to bit by bit do everything well.”
<originally published in the Chinese Sports dated January 13, 2001 by Tian Ma>
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