Wang Qijun (left) with leading Chinese oil painter Gao Xiaohua.[Photo by Liu Muyun /China Daily Sichuan Bureau]

More than 13,000 art lovers visited the painting exhibition of Professor Wang Qijun of China Central Academy of Fine Arts from Nov 24 to 30.

According to the initial plan, the exhibition would be held from Nov 24 to 28. As art lovers showed a keen interest in the works of the master painter known as one of the 60 most influential Chinese painters after the founding of the People's Republic of China, the exhibition was held for two more days.

Wang, 57, exhibited more than 100 paintings in the Chengdu Art Gallery in Sichuan province. They included oil and traditional Chinese paintings featuring the Forbidden City in Beijing, waterside towns in Wang's home province of Jiangsu, beautiful Chinese and foreign women as well as mysterious Peking Opera figures.

What is unique about Wang's oil paintings is that he has introduced China's time-honored calligraphy and the skill of traditional Chinese painting into them.

Visitors to Wang's exhibition in the Chengdu Art Academy were impressed with the visual impact of his oil paintings whose resolution is so high that they look like photos, said Pu Sanliu, an art lover.

The creativity expressed in Wang's paintings cannot be imitated and the technological content and wisdom in his works are unrivalled and cannot be mastered by average painters, comments professor Du Zhesen of China Central Academy of Fine Arts.

Du, a famous art critic, is the editor-in-chief of Art Research, a publication of China Central Academy of Fine Arts.

During his visit to Wang’s exhibition, Gao Xiaohua, one of the leading Chinese oil painters, on Nov 29, he said that it was more difficult to draw pictures with oil paint than acylic paint. But Wang created many masterpieces with oil paint proving to be a master, Gao said.

Wang's paintings known for their visual impact are much sought after by collectors.

His representative oil painting Forbidden City after the Rain was sold for 896,000 yuan in an auction by the Beijing Poly International Auction Company last year.

In the Chengdu exhibition, Wang’s paintings were sold for 7.8 million yuan ($1.2 million), organizers said.

After the exhibition, Wang will lead graduate students from China Central Academy of Fine Arts to Tibetan areas in Sichuan. They would depict Sichuan’s reconstruction after the magnitude-8.0 Wenquan earthquake in 2008 with oil paintings.