Cai Yongshun, 19, made the 30-hour plus train journey to Beijing from Southwest China's Guizhou Province only two months ago and was excited about his first visit to the National Art Museum of China this week.

With a sheet of paper in one hand and a ballpoint pen in the other, he closely followed Ge Yi, a volunteer lecturer from the Central Academy of Fine Arts. The teenager did not want to miss a word she said about the paintings, which hung in the exhibition halls on the third floor of the museum.

"I've never expected to find that so many Chinese artists are interested in painting figures and scenes I am familiar with back in my mountainous hometown," Cai said.

Cai was among the 100 migrant workers from several construction and decoration companies, sub-contracters of the Beijing Zhuzong Urban Development Corporation, invited by the museum to visit an exhibition of ink and oil paintings and prints entitled "Farmer, Farmer."

The grand exhibition, at China's most prominent art museum, is reportedly the largest of its kind in Chinese art history. It encompasses about selected 260 pieces of masterworks from both the museum's collection and 63 of today's best-known artists, who have depicted rural Chinese or migrant workers in the cities.

The earliest works date back to the 1930s, and the latest works were painted this year.

The collection "is a visual representation of social changes in China over the past century," said Shui Tianzhong, an art historian with the Research Institute of Chinese Arts.

After the guided tour, migrant workers completed questionnaires prepared by the museum.

"With the guided tour and the questionnaire, we intended to collect and analyze migrant workers' responses to the artistic creations by some of China's intellectuals," explained Xu Hong, chief curator of the exhibition.

Zhou Zhongying, an art business management major with Central Academy of Fine Arts, acted as one of the volunteer guides. "To my surprise, many of the migrant workers, especially the elder ones, know so much about the background knowledge behind the paintings that I know little about, such as the Red Army's Long March, the War of Resistance against Japanese Aggression, and the downfall of the Gang of Four and the end of the 'cultural revolution' in 1976," Zhou said.

And the migrant workers each have their own readings of the paintings and prints on display.

"Looking at the depicted country folks, I could not help thinking of my 9 year-old daughter and my aged parents," Kang Baojun, 34, a migrant worker from East China's Anhui Province, told China Daily.

Kang has worked in the interior decoration business for eight years. Like his colleagues, mostly migrant workers from different parts of China, Kang said he and his wife Li Jinfang, now a saleswoman in a Beijing department store, visited their old home only once in a year, during Spring Festival, or Chinese Lunar New Year, after spending long hours on the overcrowded trains or buses.

"Some of the portraits of farmers remind me of my beloved parents, both of whom unfortunately have passed away years ago," said Ji Wenben, 45, a skilled decorative technician and superintendent for at least 200 migrant workers in a Beijing interior decoration company.

He very much enjoyed "Parents," a 2.3-metre high and 7-metre-long coloured Chinese ink painting scroll by Guangdong-based artist Liang Yan, and the now iconic farmer's portrait entitled "Father," painted by Sichuan-based artist Luo Zhongli in a Hyper Realism approach in 1980.

"The portraits are extremely true to life, from my point of view," said Ji, whose home city of Tongjiang remains a landlocked, underdeveloped area in Southwest China's Sichuan Province.

"The sun-tanned skin, the wrinkles on the face, the deformed fingers, and the hunchbacked body shapes; these are my memories of my parents, my fellow villagers and even my former high school mates," he said.

Looking for opportunities, Ji came to Beijing about two decades ago and has now successfully gained a foothold in the Chinese capital where many newly graduated university students are still fighting for jobs.

Living in a small, rented apartment, Ji is planning to buy a new house next year for his wife and the Beijing-born son.

"We want to become real Beijing citizens," he said with a smile.

Chen Wenxuan, 52, once a laid-off worker from Shijiazhuang, capital of North China's Hebei Province, however, expressed his dissatisfaction of the artistic works on show. Living with and supported by his son and daughter, Chen now "works in Beijing as a migrant worker to earn some extra money" as he explained himself.

"I like the older masterpieces about Chinese farmers much better. Though done in the form of simple woodblock prints or traditional Chinese ink painting, those works, which address social problems straightforwardly, really pose a soul-stirring power," he noted, referring to such works as Sha Qingquan's 1941 print entitled "Growing Wheat" and Wang Yuezhi's oil painting "Dislocated Farmer," created in the late 1930s.

Compared with the works created in the 1930s and 1940s, many of the latest works are "not so impressive," he said, due to the lack of depth. "I guess they are painting farmers in their imagination," he concluded.

However, Chen and many invited migrant workers enjoyed portraits by Xin Dongwang, a farmer-turned artist and associate professor with the School of the Arts under Tsinghua University in Beijing. "Those figures look exactly like us," said Zhang Chunyong, 27, who came from Chifeng, North China's Inner Mongolia Autonomous Region and works as a carpenter.

Rich in detail, Xin's works give up close and personal snapshots of migrant workers in different Chinese cities as he travelled and did on-site portraits of them over the past few years.

"Because of their strong social conscience, Xin and some other artists, have distinguished themselves from many of their contemporaries who are instead casting their eyes on subject matters that are more marketable," pointed out Jia Fangzhou, an art critic and curator of Xin's solo art show of farmers' portraits early this year in Beijing and Shanghai.

It is an eye-catching phenomenon that, starting from the 1990s, farmers' life and situations are no longer popular themes, said Wang Shaolun, a painter from East China's Shandong Province, whose oil painting entitled "Xiaogang Village (1978)," depicting the farmers-initiated land reforms in Anhui Province in November 1978 is also on show.

"The farming population is still so huge and the future of farmers may decide the future of the whole nation," Wang said.

However he said some modern urban artists revealed their shallow understanding about the majority of people living in China. "There must be something wrong with our society and with the artists' viewpoint of today's Chinese farmers," he said.

(China Daily November 8, 2006)