Jin Zhilin is among the best-known of China's oil painters who have depicted the country's landscape, with an impressionist's use of colours and light and the Chinese aesthetic mood.

The renowned artist and professor with the Central Academy of Fine Arts (CAFA) is to stage a seven-day solo exhibition in the art museum of the CAFA at 5 Jiaowei Hutong, Wangfujing in downtown Beijing .

The exhibition, which is to open on Sunday , features 150 works by the artist. They were all created after his 1955 solo exhibition in Beijing, "Footprints of Life."

Included in the exhibition is a 4-metre-long scroll entitled "Eulogy of the Yellow River," which the 75-year-old Jin painted in his one-month walk along the river in roaring winter winds.

There are also a series of graceful 2-metre-long scrolls on display, sketching lotuses in the summer, corn-fields, bamboo, pumpkins and similar details of nature.

"I seldom paint in the room. My studio is in nature, especially the Loess Plateau of Northwest China. It's my greatest joy to face nature directly and feel its emotions," said Jin.

As a believer of traditional Chinese philosophy, Jin said that birds, flowers, bamboo or rocks are reflections of people's minds.

"To completely express the aesthetic mood of the Chinese, I have borrowed the 'scrolls' to convey my message from the ink paintings to the oil painting sketches," he said.

Born in 1928 in Central China's Henan Province, he became an oil painting teacher at the CAFA in 1951 upon graduation from the academy. He has worked at the cultural heritage administration of Yan'an, Northwest China's Shaanxi Province, on the Loess Plateau for 13 years since 1963, where he endeavoured to rescue local folk culture and archaeological findings in that area.

In 1986, Jin returned to the CAFA and taught in the folk art department. Over the past two decades, he has carried out field research on the origins of Chinese art and philosophy.

Jin's famous oil paintings, "Nanniwan" and "Party Secretary of the Commune," were collected respectively by the National Museum of China and the National Art Museum of China. He held a solo exhibition in Paris in 2000.

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