Remarkably, rather than use paint brushes and ink, 57 year-old Wang Guodong, the farmer-turned-artist with a primary school education, used an electric iron to "paint" the entire picture on rice paper, a fine quality paper used for traditional Chinese painting and calligraphy.

Wang's reproduction of the Riverside Scene at Qingming Festival, measuring 10.45 meters in length and 52 centimeters in width, captures the beauty of the original work -- with hundreds of people, a unique wooden bridge, houses, boats, cattle and plants.

Wang Guodong, a native of Yangdianzi town in Qian'an city, has been an avid painter since childhood. In his younger days he served in the People's Liberation Army as a publicity clerk. He then taught fine arts to high school students before becoming a carpenter.

When he was in his thirties, Wang became known for "ironing" vivid pictures on wood blocks. However, given the scarcity of fine wood material, he began to use paper, and his friend's request for a reproduction of Riverside Scene at Qingming Festival represents his first effort.

The reproduction, which he based on a reduced copy of the original work and which took four months to complete, is very similar to the original and has very good 3-dimensional effects. It is also rich in color, though its basic tone is brown as a result of the burns.

The original version of the ancient painting by Zhang Zeduan of the Northern Song Dynasty (960-1127) is kept at the Palace Museum in Beijing.

There have been several attempts in recent years to reproduce the painting on paper, bronze ware, ceramic tiles and paper cuts, mainly by amateur artists keen on traditional Chinese culture.

Wang told Xinhua he was also planning to recount the stories contained in the four classical Chinese novels -- The Romance of the Three Kingdoms, Outlaws of the Marsh, Pilgrimage to the West and Dream of the Red Chamber -- through his images "ironed" on hundreds of meters of rice paper.

(Xinhua News Agency March 18, 2003)