Innovative approach and greater authenticity mark surge in creativity, Yang Yang reports.

The story of writer Lu Xun features in the popular TV drama Juexing Niandai (the age of awakening). (PHOTO PROVIDED TO CHINA DAILY)

One night, more than 1,300 years ago, 14 plump girls, gorgeously dressed, happily made their way to a banquet, where they were going to play musical instruments for the emperor. This scenario is the plot of the dance Tang Yong (glazed ceramic figures of the Tang Dynasty) created by Chen Lin, a choreographer with the Zhengzhou Song and Dance Theater in Central China's Henan province.

Inspired by relics unearthed in Henan which date back to the Sui (581-618) and Tang (618-907) dynasties, the work was nominated for the Lotus Award in 2020, China's top award for professional dancers.

During this year's Spring Festival, an adaptation of the dance, A Tang Dynasty Banquet, was shown as part of a gala on Henan TV, going viral once it was released online. On Kuaishou, a short-video platform, the show, which runs for less than six minutes, had been watched more than 2.7 billion times by mid-March.

When the production team adapted it for the screen, they reduced the dance to five minutes, and used 5G technology and augmented reality to combine virtual scenes with the stage, so that the dancers appear to be performing in various museums.

The dancers perform against a projection of national treasures: Fuhao Xiao Zun (owl-shaped Fuhao alcohol vessels), tri-colored glazed ceramics of the Tang Dynasty, Zanhua Shinyu Tu (court ladies adorning their hair with flowers) and Qianli Jiangshan Tu (a panorama of rivers and mountains), among others.

"One of the biggest innovations is the element of national treasures and guofeng, or the Chinese traditional style," said Chen Lei, the director of the gala, in an earlier interview with Henan Business Daily.

"At the end of the show, the splendid Tang palace produced by animation technology is more like a two-dimensional world from online games," he says.

Revolutionary pioneer Li Dazhao also features in the TV drama Juexing Niandai (the age of awakening). (PHOTO PROVIDED TO CHINA DAILY)

On the online video platform Bilibili, it has been viewed nearly 7.5 million times. Among the more than 18,000 comments, a user named Yueliulinshuang says: "Actually, I'm not that interested in dance, but this program has presented the charmingly naive court ladies in the Tang Dynasty so incisively and vividly. Take a closer look at their playful faces, it's hard not to like them.

"The integrated combination of Tang style and classical music, the structure of the dance and the visual effects onstage, are all refreshing. The light of an artistic work that really meets the demand of the people will never be dimmed."

The show's success echoes the four expectations that President Xi Jinping raised when addressing the 10th national congress of the Association of Literature and Art and the 9th national congress of the Chinese Writers Association on Nov 30, 2016.

He called for artists and writers "to consolidate the confidence in Chinese culture and use art to inspire people", "to serve and praise the people with positive works", "to be more innovative" and "to hold to artistic ideals and inspire society with high culture".

Held every five years, a new round of the two associations' national congresses, due Tuesday, will bring the country's influential artistic elites together once more.

Over the last five years, performing arts shows around the country grew annually from 2.3 million in 2016 to 2.96 million in 2019. Audiences increased from 1.18 billion people in 2016 to 1.23 billion in 2019. Due to COVID-19, in 2020, the number of shows dropped to 2.25 million, and the number of audience members to 890 million.

Apart from the improvements in quality, over the past five years, just like A Tang Dynasty Banquet, more artists have drawn essence and power from Chinese culture to create classic works to inspire people.

A scene from sci-fi movie Wandering Earth. (PHOTO PROVIDED TO CHINA DAILY)

The top trending phrase online for 2021, recently released by the National Language Resources Monitoring and Research Center, is juexing niandai (the age of awakening). It refers to the popular TV drama, which aired in February. Based on events from 1915 to 1921, a critical period for the founding of the Communist Party of China, the show has been rated 9.3 points out of 10 by more than 380,000 users on review platform Douban.

The perseverance and courage of revolutionary pioneers like Li Dazhao, as well as the story of renowned writer Lu Xun, inspired many young people.

In the last five years, more artists have created works about the lives, voices and emotion of the people that created history.

As Lu Xun wrote: "The world afar and millions of people, they are all related to me." It is a tradition for Chinese writers to care about the most ordinary people and to write about their lives.

At the start of 2018, writer Zhao Defa went to villages in Shandong province and created the novel Jing Shanhai (through mountains and seas). The novel, telling a story about poverty alleviation and the revival of the rural areas in a town by the Yellow Sea, won the Wugeyi (literally meaning "best works in five areas") Project award. A TV adaptation aired earlier this year.

"How lucky I am to witness Chinese people eradicate absolute poverty. It is a human wonder. I felt such a sense of history while I was creating the novel," he says.

Xin Ju (Residence of Heart) by Shanghai writer Teng Xiaolan focuses on the residence and marriage of common people in Shanghai. "She observes and writes about people's life meticulously," says Sun Ganlu, novelist and deputy director of Shanghai Writers Association.

"It's not a simple description, but represents the complexity of common people's lives," he says.

In April, it won a China Central Television best book award for 2020.

One of the highest-grossing movies in Chinese film history is Dying to Survive. It is adapted from the real-life experience of a leukemia patient Lu Yong who purchased affordable cancer medication from India for himself and others. The film screened in 2018 and touched many people.

With box office takings of more than 3 billion yuan ($471 million), it was rated 9 points out of 10 by over 1.82 million users on Douban. The movie won many awards, including the Best Cross-Straits Chinese Film at the 38th Hong Kong Film Awards and Excellent Feature Film at the 35th Hundred Flowers Film Festival.

Dancers present A Tang Dynasty Banquet, inspired by glazed ceramic figures of musicians. (LI JIA'NAN / XINHUA)

Commenting on the film, Xie Fei, director and professor with Beijing Film Academy, said on Douban, "Congratulations to the director Wen Muye. It's such an extraordinary debut work, so solid, touching and insightful."

Another popular movie that did well at the box office in 2019, passing 2.8 billion yuan, is The Captain. It, too, is adapted from a real incident. On a Sichuan Airlines flight on May 14, 2018, the aircraft's windscreen suddenly broke 9,000 meters above sea level en route from Lhasa to Chongqing.

Withstanding extreme cold, a shortage of oxygen, strong winds and ear-splitting noise, the pilot Liu Chuanjian operated the airplane manually, managing to bring 119 passengers and nine crew members to the ground safely.

In 2018, Wu Weishan, sculptor and curator of National Art Museum of China, spent a period of time on the prairie of the Inner Mongolia autonomous region. Watching the local people wrestle and perform, the artist became inspired and drew many sketches. During his interactions with local people, he said in an interview with The Paper that he felt the wrestlers' sense of vitality, and the confidence they felt when in nature. It is an open-hearted, bold and unconstrained disposition, nurtured by the prairie. After returning to Beijing, Wu created The Prairie, sculpting a strong wrestler to represent nature's personality.

"Without the time spent there observing people's lives, I wouldn't have been inspired. If I hadn't drunk milk and eaten lamb, or sang and danced with them, I would not have yearned for their personality, nurtured by the grassland, and would not have created such a work," he says, adding that "it's so important for artists to plunge into life to draw inspiration".

Wandering Earth set a milestone for Chinese sci-fi movies in terms of industrial standards, and more artists are trying to create innovative works that reflect the nation's soft power and creativity.

In a concept theater show 2047 Apologue, which was first performed in June 2017, director Zhang Yimou managed to combine Chinese traditional and folk art forms, such as Peking Opera and Wanwanqiang Opera from Shaanxi province, with advanced multimedia technology like iPads, lasers and holograms. By looking back at the past and to the future, the show aims to explore the relationship between people and technology.

In making the mainland's first Cantonese Opera film The White Snake, director Zhang Xianfeng employed surround sound and high definition to create an art film that was based on a legend dating back to the Tang Dynasty.

Created to help the local opera reach a younger and wider audience, the film grossed a box office of nearly 14 million yuan, and was seen by more than 350,000 people. On Douban, more than 32,000 users rated it 8.1 points out of 10.

Over the last five years, artists, while drawing inspiration from tradition, reality, and people, have tried to deliver in their works a representation of the true, good and beautiful positive energy that can inspire people in diverse ways.

Contact the writer at yangyangs@chinadaily.com.cn