A hen with colourful feathers is incubating eggs which, believe it or not, are purple and green.

Moreover, what looks like a tree branch is growing out of her roost, weighed down by flowers of dazzling colours.

The picture epitomizes how the painter, a great-grandmother in an eastern Chinese village, perceives her life in the countryside.

When asked by a foreign art collector why her painting was so unrealistic, 97-year-old Ruan Sidi said: "Because it's beautiful."

Ruan lives in Jinshan County near Shanghai, China's economic and financial centre. She is fond of doing "farmer paintings" or modern Chinese folk paintings, to be exact.

To a trained eye, "farmer paintings" are characterized by dazzling colours, distorted objects in nature, sometimes with a mysterious atmosphere that instantly makes the viewer call to mind Dali, Chagall and even Picasso.

These home grown paintings, which originally have their roots in rural villages, have now spread further afar. They have struck the world as a new genre of post-modernist art form.

"Farmer paintings, so to speak, are not just exotic in artistic style," said Chen Yufeng, director of the Fine Art Department of the Xiuzhou District Cultural Centre in the city of Jiaxing of Zhejiang Province, East China.

"They represent a brand new artistic language appreciated not only by our country folks but also by many city people, not only in China but also abroad."

Painting has remained a unique means of expression among the rural Chinese ever since ancient times. In their own way, they portray their lives, share their feelings and dreams.

In the past, most folk painters were anonymous despite the popularity their works were able to enjoy.

"The silence has been broken," said Chen.

Xiuzhou District in Jiaxing is now playing host to the Second Exhibition of Chinese Farmer Paintings, at which Ruan Sidi and 39 other folk painters were awarded the title of "outstanding modern Chinese folk painter."

The exhibition is part of the Seventh China Arts Festival, which has Hangzhou, the provincial capital, as its centre.

"We hope that the event will give a thorough review of the art genre's development and that the art will continue to prosper," Zhang Xu, an official with the Ministry of Culture, said at the exhibition's opening ceremony in early September.

The exhibition set aside a special section showcasing the works of farmers during the Great Leap Forward period in the late 1950s.

In those days, rural people created a lot of paintings on the walls to propagate the ideas for boosting production, celebrating the establishment of communes and building socialism.

In those old paintings, corn stalks are presented as thrusting into the sky, forming a "forest" that blocks the flight route of an airplane, and pigs raised by people's communes, as bigger than elephants.

Paddies are invariably laden with mountains of newly harvested rice, with jubilant commune members dancing on top of them.

"Our revolutionary fervour was beyond description," Ruan Sidi said. "People believed that just by daring to think, one can produce miracles."

As China has embarked on reforms for building a market economy and social development, rural folk paintings have taken on a new look.

Gone are those of revolutionary fantasies. In their place are "farmer paintings" done on paper, which in many cases are meant for sale as tourist souvenirs.

As art critics put it, farmer paintings as an independent art genre embrace a primitive simplicity and characteristic exaggeration of China's folk art.

Nationwide, 66 counties have been officially named as "homes to farmer painting," where folk artists make a living by selling their paintings as tourist souvenirs while engaging in crop farming and livestock breeding.

The best known among them is Huxian County, a few hours drive from Xi'an, capital of Northwest China's Shaanxi Province, where there are 2,000 established "farmer painters."

A "farmer painting" sells at several to a dozen US dollars, and most buyers are foreign tourists. "Not every one is familiar with Chinese folk art," Chen Yufeng said. "Some visitors come just out of curiosity. They seem to think that the more crude a painting looks, the more valuable it will be."

Because of this, Chen said, a panel of nine experts hand-picked 928 of what they believed to be the best farmer paintings for the exhibition.

These works fall into three categories - gouache, woodblock and pen-and-ink paintings.

They show two obvious trends. The first is that some farmer-painters pursue artistic professionalism while retaining in a traditional style of primitive simplicity.

From a portrait titled "Old Party Branch Secretary" by Liu Zhide in Huxian, the viewer can easily detect the artist's attempt at integrating tradition with some professional training - a vast unpainted space on paper and an anatomical precision of the human body.

The former characterizes traditional Chinese painting techniques and the latter, Western paintings.

Meanwhile, farmer painters are trying to use techniques of other traditional art forms - paper-cutting, embroidery, New Year painting - in their artistic creations.

Miao Huixin, whom the Time magazine named as one of the 10 "outstanding Asian artists" of 1998, had his latest work "Village in March" displayed.

An advocate of the traditional rustic style, he believes the charisma of farmer paintings should always stem from the heart and soul of "a bunch of proud country bumpkins."

Obsessed with farmer paintings, an increasing number of urban residents now dream of leading a "country bumpkin's life."

According to the latest survey by the Xiuzhou Cultural Centre, people of all walks of life, not only from among people who live on farming, have tried their hand at creating works in the "farmers' painting" style.

From: China Daily