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.