The heroic and unflinching spirit of Chinese people in the face of last year's devastating earthquake has been distilled into art. To mark the first anniversary of the Wenchuan earthquake, an art exhibition has opened in Sichuan Province.

The exhibition "Thanksgiving and Rebuilding" aims to portray the staunch, unbending spirit of Chinese people to conquer the natural disaster. The Chinese Artists Association organized the exhibition and selected 170 works of more than four-thousand submissions from across the country.

The participating artists say the earthquake may be a bitter memory, but the people's concerted effort to fight adversity has greatly inspired them. They want to use art medium to record the human side of the event.

The magnitude-8.0 quake, with the epicenter in Wenchuan of southwest China's Sichuan Province, left nearly eighty-seven thousand people dead or missing and about 400-thousand injured.

The exhibit attracted more than one-thousand visitors on its opening day and it will run at the Sichuan Art Museum until May the 24th.

(CCTV May 12, 2009)