Seasonal Wisdom

In 2016, the 24 solar terms were added to UNESCO's List of Intangible Cultural Heritage.

Xu Dongdong started creating paintings about each solar term, as well as the phenological signals on corresponding days.

It took him eight years to complete the whole series-142 paintings of the series are featured in the new book.

"Painting is not the end. Exploring the truth is the end," says the 63-year-old artist.

In the paintings, he not only uses an abstract style to present the intangible cultural heritage, but also creates new things from traditional Chinese culture, he says.

"Abstract logical thinking can inspire young people's imagination and creativity. During modernization, if we want to build our own scientific and industrial systems, we first need to build our abstract logical thinking system," he says.

Painting the series was to stand at the meeting point of the East and the West and explore Chinese abstract logical thinking that may help to build China's new culture and support value identification in the future global transformation, he says.

When the project was still in progress, Xu Lijing, a senior editor from Economic Daily, visited him and the impact she felt seeing the paintings still lingers on her mind.

It is a valuable thing to use new skills to systematically represent the ancient 24 solar terms and 72 phenological signals and to impart them with new thoughts and meanings, she says.