“When you pick up a brush, don’t ever ask anyone for help. Because the most wonderful thing about painting is being left alone with your own imagination. I do not paint to get praise from others, but to play a game of endless joy,” quoted(引用) Chinese artist Wang Yani.

Wang Yani was born in 1975 in Gongcheng, a small town in South China. Her father, Wang Shiqiang, an oil painter himself, saw Yani’s love for painting when she was about two years old. He was working with others while Yani read some children’s books. Feeling bored, she began to draw on the wall. Wang Shiqiang did not take it seriously until she scribbled(乱画) all over his own painting that he had just completed and planned to send to a publisher(出版商). Yani cried, “Daddy, I want to paint like you!” Shiqiang thought of his own childhood and how much he wanted to learn painting. He decided to give Yani the chance he never had.

Shiqiang provided Yani with paints and brushes and paper and encouraged her to follow her passion. She painted scenes and characters from nature—flowers in the front of her house, trees at the back, chickens and ducks and dogs and cats in the yard. After a visit to the Nanning Zoo at age 3, she became smitten with monkeys and then she painted hundreds of them. Her painting of two monkeys, completed at age 4, was put on a stamp when she was 8. At age 14, she had an exhibition at a London museum. Later, she became the youngest artist to have her work exhibited at the Arthur M. Sackler Gallery of the Smithsonian Institution.