Imaginative artist brings novel characters to life

YINCHUAN－Chai Peike, 83, has taken up an ambitious project to paint 480 characters that appear in A Dream of Red Mansions, one of the four most famous classical Chinese literary works.

Chai hails from Guyuan city in Northwest China's Ningxia Hui autonomous region and is proficient in Chinese brush painting.

Over the years, he has developed a habit of turning the characters of novels he has read into images.