There's more to beans than curd and paste; they can also be made into elaborate artworks.

Bean painting, where beans are used as the raw material, is a kind of folk art, adopting artistic characteristics from Chinese traditional painting, sculpting and decorative arts. Instead of completely imitating traditional arts, the genre boasts its own special flavor.

Yang Jing, who works at the Palace Museum in Beijing, made the first bean painting in 1987. Since then, bean painting has developed from the simple to the complex and includes nearly 100 types.

The procedure of bean painting is as follows: Choose many beans of various colors, shapes and sizes, braise or boil them at a high temperature, arrange them with flowers and paper streamers, and finally affix them onto different paperboards.

With its various contents, themes and shapes, such as landscapes, birds, flowers, animals and figures, bean painting is very well known. It incorporates both sculpting and the color and line effects of drawing to feature a rare folk flavor that expresses fortune and happiness. Representative works such as "Loving Mother" and "Spend the New Year", which are full of simple folk-custom flavors, are pleasing to both the eye and the mind. Other bean paintings like "Three Monks" and "Whistle Jigs To A Milestone" recount popular folk tales and teach a profound moral lesson. All bean paintings are filled with an old Beijing spice and a tinge of daily life.

Bean-painting artists aspire to achieving realism in their works, paying a great deal of attention to mastering lifelike expressions and gestures. The most distinct feature of bean painting is simplicity tinged with exaggeration to emphasize an abundance of sensations.