THE great Pablo Picasso once visited a children's art show and said: "At that age I could draw like Raphael ... it took me years to learn to draw like these children."

However, in China, the value of children's art is yet to be fully realized, with many children's paintings ending up in dustbins. In this sense 6-year-old Calsun Wang is lucky. His painting "The Love in Heaven" was sold for 50,000 yuan (US$6,250) earlier this month at the nation's first ever auction of children's art.

The painting depicts two persons, a red man and a green woman, each on a ladder. The higher ladder is painted in blue and white, representing heaven, and the lower one in black and gray, representing the earth, according to his mother Huang Huiqun. His teacher Wu Xiaoyan named the painting "The Love in Heaven."

Wang started to learn painting a year ago. Dong Jianguo, a local art teacher, said Wang's painting style resembles that of the American artist Willem de Kooning. His paintings feature striking colors and winding staircases - which he has been drawing, for no reason, even before he started learning to paint.

Wang seldom tells people the meaning of his paintings. Having been diagnosed with infantile autism by a Guangzhou hospital at the age of 2, he has difficulty communicating with others. And painting is his most important method of communication with the outside world. Fortunately he has parents and teachers who can understand him.

"I often stand before his paintings for a long period of time and feel greatly moved. I asked myself: Why the children's world is so beautiful, so far away from the adult world, and yet so attractive?" said the 46-year-old mother.

It took Huang four years to gradually enter the boy's life and then lead him out of his once-secluded world, with the help of doctors and teachers. Now Huang believes she is already 70 percent successful in treating the boy's infantile autism - in fact, last year doctors in Shenzhen said Wang was not suffering from autism. It was a great victory, considering that the rate of recovery from infantile autism is as low as one in every 10,000.

In the past year, the boy has improved tremendously in the ability to express himself through both paintings and language. He participates in all the activities of his kindergarten, and has even taken part in the shooting of a CCTV program titled "The Kids of Football," said Huang.

The news about his painting being sold for 50,000 yuan has made him a celebrity at the kindergarten. "Once a classmate of Calsun saw a photo and asked if it was painted by Calsun," said Wang's smiling mother. Although the children still feel Wang is different from them, they respect him for his talent, she said.

But the new celebrity status has not changed Wang much. "Fame means nothing to him," said the mother. Although he loves painting, he is not overly proud of his own work, and often starts to scribble before completing a painting. So his mother has to use ice cream to entice him to completing a work.

Huang is tremendously grateful to the boy's teacher Wu, who accepted the hard-to-control boy as her student, giving Calsun a new world where he could talk through painting. She also feels indebted to the Victoria kindergarten for accepting the child, and Andy Cutler, a doctor who generously gave suggestions for the boy's treatment.

Even though she quit her job and has spent all her time and energy on the boy in the past four years, Huang believes it's all worth it. "I learned a lot from him. He made my world more colorful," she said.

Editor: Wing