Comparing the lacquer works she made years ago to the ones she's making now, the progress is apparent in Yuwen Renjie's experiment.

The lacquer paintings she created when she was pursuing a bachelor's degree at the College of Art and Design of the Beijing University of Technology show the initial stages of a young artist passionate about lacquer art, who was attempting to understand the characteristic of this hard-to-handle material.

While judging her latest installation series X, Yuwen, now studying for her master's degree at Western Carolina University, North Carolina, the United States, shows more ease with lacquer, which, she says, has been her co-worker in creating vanguard art.

She has deviated from the highly decorative painting patterns of lacquer art and ventured into an experimental, conceptual way of expression.

For the X works, for example, she coated a dozen fresh apples with cotton strips soaked in lacquer and left them to mature and decay. The works show the lacquered apples in different states of ripeness and dryness, and how the lacquer coating creates changes.

Yuwen employed jiazhu treatment to the traditional lacquer technique — coating the core with one or more layers of lacquer-soaked cotton — while her finished works are pieces of contemporary art, either in appearance or the information conveyed.

"I feel that lacquer is the true creator of this. I've only built a stage for it to do the rest of the job," says the 27-year-old artist.

"My intention is not for people to pay attention to the intricate techniques but the material itself — how it interacts with apples and evolves in time and to think about how time shapes us into who we are."

These works are currently on show at Material Thinking, an exhibition at the Karamay Science and Technology Museum in Karamay, Xinjiang Uygur autonomous region.

Running until Dec 10, the exhibition is organized by the Academy of Arts and Design of Tsinghua University, to inspire the creation of art that explores the possibilities of different materials as the center of an artist's work.

For Yuwen and the generation of artists who work with lacquer, the material is no longer something used to render a sheen, to decorate or to be used for other applied purposes. Rather, it is something they use to explore the forefront of artistic expression and new aesthetics.

The endeavors to modernize lacquer art date back several decades to the early 1960s, when Qiao Shiguang (1937-2022), then a young teacher at the Central Academy of Arts & Design — now the Academy of Arts and Design of Tsinghua University — researched lacquer to see if it could be used in the wall paintings, which he specialized in.

His interest intensified as he studied, and Qiao invested his heart and mind in a lifelong endeavor to usher traditional lacquer art into modern techniques, attesting to people's varied cultural needs. Leaving behind an oeuvre of mesmerizing paintings, he is recognized as "the father of modern lacquer art".

His pieces show the unique beauty and shimmer of lacquer and the artistry that can be achieved on a painting's flat surface, unlike that of three-dimensional objects.

One example is Water Splashing Festival, which he created in 1978, depicting an animated scene of the Dai ethnic group celebrating one of their much-cherished folk events.

Now a collection of the National Art Museum of China, his works employ the sanyuan (three distances) method of Chinese landscape painting — the long, middle and close-up views — and his treatment to arrange the dressed-up women apart in the foreground exhibits the influence of court ladies paintings of the Tang Dynasty (618-907).The minimalist style of Chinese painting also inspired Qiao when creating another signature work, Hui-Style Residence, in which he focused on the simple beauty of the whitewashed walls and obsidian roofs of the civil dwellings in Anhui province, as well as the tranquil atmosphere. However, he didn't forget the traditional techniques; in painting walls and streets, he embedded eggshells to add dimension.

Qiao once said it took great difficulty, even though he juggled lacquer and painting for over four decades, to find the right spot where the brush strokes are well-matched with the distinctive merits of lacquer.

"Neither side should be comprised in the creative process. I never want to 'disappoint' lacquer, nor dare to 'fail' painting. It is hard," he said.

Decades later, after Wang Ziting began her doctoral studies at the same academy where Qiao studied and taught, she felt that same pressure. Her mentors include Li Xiangqun, 63, an influential sculptor who has also been integrating lacquer into his work.

Not only has Wang inherited the techniques but also inherited the spirit to walk the modern path of lacquer art.

Her works are also exhibited at Material Thinking. The series, called The Woman Beheld, reflects a diverse exploration of lacquer — paintings, sculptures and installations. The idea behind her work dwells on the situation of a woman in society being watched, gazed upon and talked about.

She describes building the relationship with lacquer as a "happy and painful" process, as she tries to pull lacquer out of its "comfort zone" — as a decorative coating — to discover more expressions.

She says her efforts and those of other lacquer artists deserve to be shown to the public as an updated rendition of lacquer art.

This is the idea behind The New Crafts, an exhibition that Wang's academy has held every year since 2015. Its sixth installment is held at the National Centre for the Performing Arts in Beijing. The lacquer section is curated by Yang Peizhang.

"We show how technological progress has benefited artists, motivating them to develop new techniques and present boundless imagination. We also show the works of artists from Japan, South Korea and Europe to introduce novel ways of presenting lacquer," he says.

"Lacquer art should not only be preserved as handicraft but should also be integrated into the context of modern industries. That would allow artists better career prospects and people with more chances to use lacquer items in their daily lives."