A special exhibition featuring about 100 paintings by more than 50 representative artists from the Ming (1368-1644) and Qing (1644-1911) dynasties opened at the Shenzhen Museum on Wednesday.

All works on display are borrowed from the Nanjing Museum, which is well-known for its rich collection of calligraphy and paintings from the Ming and Qing dynasties.

This is the first exhibition the Shenzhen Museum has staged in the new year and follows the Italian Renaissance art exhibition, which ran from October through December last year in the museum.

"The very reason why we hold such an exhibition of selected paintings of the Ming and Qing dynasties is because we want to give the city's art lovers a chance to reflect on the great achievements Chinese artists made in a period of time that roughly corresponded to the Italian Renaissance (1420-1600)," said Wang Bi, curator of the Shenzhen Museum.

Representative artists from the Ming Dynasty include Lin Liang and Lu Ji, the so-called "Four Masters of Ming Dynasty" including Shen Zhou, Wen Zhengming, Tang Yin and Qiu Ying, and Dong Qichang, chief of the "Songjiang School."

Artists from the Qing Dynasty include the "Six Moguls of the Early Qing Dynasty," the "Four Monks" represented by Zhu Da and Shi Tao, and the "Eight Eccentrics of Yangzhou" represented by Jin Nong and Zheng Xie.

"Of all the works on display, at least one-fifth are first-class relics of the State, and some are being shown to the public for the first time," Wang said.

A six-scroll landscape painting by Zhu Da is the only one of its kind still in existence, which was kept accessible only to scholars and experts before.

As one of the earliest modern museums in China, the Nanjing Museum was established in 1933. Today it has more than 420,000 various historical and cultural relics, which rank it the third in the country, behind the Palace Museums in Beijing and Taipei.

Editor: Catherine