Deep in the rural southwest lives a Tibetan painter whose fame has spread around the world.

But fame has not affected Nyima Tsering: "Fame has a boundary and dies quickly," he said.

Nyima Tsering's real interest is to better reveal to the world with his paint brushes the true Tibet - rich in religious tradition and in urgent need to be modernized, said Xinhua News Agency.

Anthony Ether, a BBC television producer, praised Nyima Tsering's talents. He said the artist had finished within only dozens of years what took European artists five centuries when it came to the modernization of religious painting.

Nyima Tsering's passion for painting originated from his hometown, Dege County, in the Tibetan Autonomous Prefecture of Garze, an ancient cultural city surrounded by the Dege Scripture Printing Academy.

Colorful mural paintings and solemn, but vivid bronze clay scriptures gave him the first impressions of the religion.

His systematic study of painting dates back to 1958, when Sichuan Academy of Fine Arts established a national minority class to enroll talented students from areas inhabited by minorities.

Decades later Nyima Tsering recalled that it was there, learning the basic skills of sketching, dissecting, perspective and coloring, he felt able to decipher the profound and mysterious scriptures and paintings for the first time.

Between 1957 and 1967, more than 100 minority teen-agers were admitted to the academy and later embarked on the road of ethnic arts. Among them, Nyima Tsering, who stood out and took the lead in modernizing ethnic art by steering Tibetan painting out of religious ruts.

After graduating in 1962, Nyima Tsering followed the steps of other folk painters and simply paint religious scenes.

He attributed his depicting average Tibetan people and Tibetan natural conditions to a sudden insight drawn from several Tibetan female sheepherders, struggling in a sandstorm to search for their missing yaks.

"Once you lay down on the ground, the wind mixed with sand can almost float you up into the air. What a tenacious vitality there! Weren't those average Tibetans worthy of being idolized?" Nyima Tsering contemplated.

To reveal Tibetan people's indomitable vitality and the harmony between nature and humankind, Nyima Tsering pioneered a new track by adding Western painting's realism and Han's simplicity to Tibetan arts' mysterious abstract.

Such an experiment enraged traditional audiences, including his mother. She even warned him not to "go awry."

Help came at this juncture from the late 10th Bainqen, who appreciated his early 1980s work "King Gesar" and granted him the title of "Bainqen Master Painter," an honor for the best painter throughout Tibet.

Nyima Tsering's resolution to innovate consolidated as he ac-companied the 10th Bainqen to tour Tibet to get a better understanding of the people's dreams and needs.

Fluent in Mandarin and Tibetan, the 57 year-old ethnic artist, critics say, has made the invisible soul of Tibetan people shine like the sun.

(Eastday.com.cn 07/26/2001)