Yang Liuyi, a national first-class artist and president of Beijing Urban Landscape Research Association, was appointed as the honorary president of Zhongshan Painting and Calligraphy Institute on January 5. The appointment ceremony was held at the Zhongshan Online Press Conference Hall & Zhongshan International Communication Center.

Yang, who has visited Zhongshan many times and held art exhibitions, said he deeply felt that Zhongshan is a city attaching great importance to cultural development. In the future, he would work with artists in Zhongshan to create works about this beautiful city, making each painting a vivid narrator of the city's stories. At the appointment ceremony, Yang presented one of his traditional Chinese paintings "Landscape and Family" to Zhongshan Painting and Calligraphy Institute.

Yang is a pathfinder in Chinese city landscape painting. He was the first to put forward the theoretical system of city landscape painting, and has been granted related national-level intellectual property rights. His works "The Artistic Conception of Song Poetry", "Acropolis of Athens" and "Low-profile Mountains on a Par with the Sky" were once carried by Shenzhou VI, Shenzhou VII and Tiangong-1 into space. Yang has been appointed as an advisor or a guest professor by many Chinese universities and institutes. He has published over 20 painting albums and more than 50 volumes of work collections. 

After the appointment ceremony, Yang had a discussion with artists in Zhongshan.

The participating artists believed that Yang's city landscape paintings are ingenious, showing the characteristics, history, ecology, environment, geography and cultural features of different cities. Combining traditional and modern elements, cities and landscape, and reality and ideals, his concept of creation has opened up a new path for the diversified development of Zhongshan's literature and art.