In good news for history buffs and culture lovers, the second season of Century Masters, a large-scale docuseries featuring the legacy of 20th-century Chinese artists, is now translated into several foreign languages and will be available online starting Aug.21.

With a total of five episodes, each about 52 minutes long, the stories of five outstanding figures — including painter Li Kuchan, Peking Opera artist Shang Xiaoyun, and painters Guan Shanyue, Wu Guanzhong and Huang Zhou, are told to a much broader audience outside the Chinese-speaking world.

The content will stream on new media platforms, such as Xuexi.cn, Tencent Video, iQiyi, Sohu TV and so on, accessible in English, French, Russian, Spanish and Arabic.

Li Kuchan was a renowned Chinese painter, calligrapher and art educator who specialized in free-stroke brush paintings. Born into a poor peasant family in East China's Shandong Province, Li had to work really hard to pay for art school in Beijing.

In 1923, he began to study under Qi Baishi (1864-1957), one of the most renowned contemporary Chinese painters. Later on, Li created a unique kind of bird-and-flower painting using the free and spontaneous "xieyi" style (freehand brushwork used in traditional Chinese painting).

The early 1900s are widely considered the golden age of Peking Opera. The four artists, Mei Lanfang, Cheng Yanqiu, Shang Xiaoyun and Xun Huisheng, are widely known as the Four Great Dan of Peking Opera.

Shang Xiaoyun's style was known as "bang", the Chinese term for "bravo". Shang started his opera journey as a martial arts character and his performance style was powerful. He was particularly adept at portraying brave and heroic women characters.

The late painter Guan Shanyue led his peers at the Lingnan School of Painting, formed in the early 20th-century in the southern city of Guangzhou, to revolutionize the classic Chinese mountain-and-water paintings.

The gigantic piece, The Land is So Rich in Beauty, at the Great Hall of the People is among his most famous creations. Guan also donated some 800 of his paintings to build an art museum named after him in Shenzhen in 1997.

Wu Guanzhong, whose fusion of Western modernism and traditional Chinese painting, made him one of China's most forward-looking and admired artists. Coming back to China from Paris, he taught in several prestigious Chinese art institutes.

Trained in traditional Chinese ink and brush painting, as well as Western-style oil painting, Wu went on to develop an artistic hybrid style expressed in landscape views captured on painting trips all over China and beyond.

Masterpieces by Huang, like A Blizzard in the Wilderness, Celebrating the Harvest and On Patrol, represent innovative achievements in contemporary Chinese painting with vigorous strokes and a strong personality.

He co-founded the Research Institute of Traditional Chinese Painting with famous painters Li Keran, Cai Ruohong and Hua Junwu, and presided over the establishment of the Yan Huang Art Museum. His artistic practice and theory exerted a significant influence on the development of contemporary art.

(Source: chinadaily.com.cn)