Hu Yanting, a 60-year-old farmer, has a funny side to him.

He belongs to the Frog Comic Art Society, a 23-year-old local club in Qiuxian County of North China's Hebei Province. The club consists of some 200 comic and cartoon artists, mostly amateurs like Hu who make their living as farmers.

When Hu heard one of his comic works was selected for the China National Comic Art Exhibition 2006, he rushed to the bus station to book a ticket bound for Beijing.

"Now, here I am at the art show. I can learn some new ideas about comic art. And I can make more friends with the same interest as me," said Hu.

The event kicked off on Friday morning, and the National Art Museum of China was occupied by hundreds of comic artists and their fans from Beijing and nearby cities.

The arrival of each comic artist at the opening ceremony attracted attention from fans.

Among them were also five of Hu's fellow club members.

Zhang Aixue is a 33-year-old club member who has successfully turned himself from a local farmer to a full-time comic and cartoon artist.

"We never expected that so many people would know about us and love our works," said Zhang, who has devoted his time and energy to comic art since he was 11 years old.

The Zikai Cup China National Comic Art Exhibition 2006, held every two years in Beijing, has been co-sponsored by the Comic and Cartoon Artists Committee (CCAC) under the Chinese Artists Association and the Tongxiang people's government in Zhejiang Province since 1996, according to CCAC vice-director Zhang Yaoning, also a famed news cartoonist in Beijing.

The art contest and exhibition runs until July 25 before traveling to East China's Zhejiang Province. It was named after Feng Zikai (1898-1975), one of the pioneers of modern Chinese comic and cartooning art, and native son of today's Tongxiang of Zhejiang Province.

The exhibition features 141 selected comics and cartoons by Chinese artists from different parts of the country, according to Zhang.

Aiming to showcase the latest development of Chinese comic art over the past two to three years, this exhibition "tries to cover as many diversified types of comic works as possible," Zhang said.

Among them are the traditional, satirical "caricatures," experimental cartoons done with Chinese ink, comic scenes painted meticulously with oil on canvases, the abstract or conceptual comics, and the multi-frame, narrative comic strips, and the manga, or Japanese-style comic books.

The exhibition also includes bronze sculptures rendered in an exaggerated approach, much like caricatures. There are funny-looking paper cuttings and comic works combining computer-aided graphics and digital photos.

All these works will compete for three Golden Monkey Awards, the top-level honor for Chinese comic artists and cartoonists, to be announced later this month, Zhang said.

Today, more and more people are using the somewhat vague and confusing term "dongman" to cover both comical graphics (traditionally called "manhua") and animation/cartoon movies (traditionally called "donghua" in Chinese).

But no matter what it is called, "over the past few years, comic art has developed into an art genre extremely popular among Chinese viewers especially the teenagers," said Zhang, who is also a panel judge for the contest portion of the event.

Although viewers familiar with Chinese comic art scene may find many established comic artists such as Fang Cheng and Miao Yintang, the exhibition "actually serves as an arena for innovative comic artists who are still striving to find their own voices," pointed out Xia Dachuan, secretary-general of the organizing committee of the exhibition.

The contestants for the art exhibition are aged from 20 and 90.

The oldest comic artist participating in the show is Jiang Yousheng, a 90-year-old from Beijing. His humorous piece entitled "Geomancer Decides Which House to Buy" touches on the irregularities in the Chinese capital's real estate market.

The youngest participant is Sun Yuanwei, 20, from the Inner Mongolia Autonomous Region. His popular multi-frame comics entitled "Xiao Buding Series" is about a Chinese Harry Potter-type boy and his unusual experiences in a magical world.

Young as he is, Sun has been running a small comics company and has published 12 comic books over the past three years.

Sun enjoys an increasing fan base which communicates with him through his personal website, www.0905.com.cn.

"Among my loyal fans are not only primary school pupils, junior middle school students but also young mums who read my books while nursing their babies," Sun said.

But he revealed that his ultimate goal is not just to make money from comic books but to establish his own brand and entertainment empire, like the Walt Disney Company or Warner Brothers.

Sun is one example of the younger generation of Chinese comic artists who are ambitious to push forward their genre, pointed out Wu Jianjun, a veteran comic artist in Beijing.

Chinese comic artists, with a strong sense of national pride, are unwilling to see millions of Chinese teenage readers sticking obsessively to comic books from Japan and South Korea, two more mature markets for comic art and industry, said Xia Dachuan.

The 37-year-old artist has won more than 50 international awards for comics and cartoon works since 1994.

He is called by some critics as one of the few "active, vanguard comic artists," along with peers Xia Lichuan, Li Haifeng, Xu Tao, Jin Hui, Liu Hong, Leng Mu and Cai Lian.

But this time, Xia presents the viewers with a different type of work, portraying a Goddess of Compassion with a thousand arms standing side by side with a Western-style sculpture of a nymph. The latter has acquired a pair of arms from the Chinese goddess.

"With this piece, I am trying to say that Chinese culture is not a living fossil in the 21st century. Instead, it has a great role to play to counterbalance the influence of Western civilization," Xia explained.

"I believe that only when the East meets the West in a harmonious fashion, other than collision and conflict, can the world attain long lasting peace and overall prosperity."

(China Daily July 18, 2006)