SYDNEY, Jan. 12 (Xinhua) -- With the Chinese lunar New Year of the Rabbit to come in days, a Chinese painting exhibition kicked off here on Wednesday, extending Spring Festival greetings to local residents.

As part of the "Happy Chinese New Year" celebrations worldwide, the exhibition presented 40 artworks created by 10 Chinese artists living in Australia, who combined the elements of Chinese traditional culture with diverse expression styles.

Covering various themes like landscapes, flowers and birds, the works featured a wide range of time-honored painting techniques, including meticulous painting, freestyle splash-ink and colorful ink painting as well as figurative painting.

The color painting "The Rabbit Leaps to a New Journey" impressed visitors with its lively and joyful image of a grey hare hopping beside a little girl, while "The Auspicious Rabbit Welcomes Spring" depicted two white rabbits biting corns under blooming peonies, expressing good wishes for a promising and fruitful new year.

Besides, several landscape paintings, such as "Autumn Waterfall" and "The Clouds in the Mountain", invited people to feel the majestic view of mountains and waters in China through bold strokes and superimposed shading.

"At the beginning of the new year, the exhibition through its unique Chinese ink painting will not only highlight the rich artistic expression power of the Chinese painting and the adherence to the Chinese artistic traditions by overseas Chinese artists in Australia, but also enhance the Australian's understanding of the profound Chinese traditional culture and its inheritance and evolvement in the modern times," said Liu Dong, deputy director of the China Cultural Center in Sydney, at the opening ceremony.

The exhibition will run through Feb. 24.