China Central Academy of Fine Arts

China Central Academy of Fine Arts, located in Beijing, the capital of China, is an academy where culture, history and art are flourishing, which enjoys the best art resources of the world. CAFA, as a leading institution for modern art education in China, provides a rich land for those who wish to learn experience and engage in creativities, which has nurtured quite a lot of pre-eminent artists in the past ninety years.

 

The Central Academy of Fine Arts (CAFA), the only art academy of higher learning directly under the Ministry of Education, was founded in April 1950 by incorporating the National Beiping Art College and the Fine Arts Department of Huabei University. Chairman Mao Zedong inscribed the name for the Academy. The National Beiping Art College could trace its roots back to the National Beijing Art College, the first national art education institution in Chinese history as well as the beginning of modern art education in China, which was founded in 1918 under the initiative of the well-known educationist Cai Yuanpei. Such known artists as Xu Beihong, Jiang Feng, Wu Zuoren, Gu Yuan and Jin Shangyi, etc., were presidents of CAFA successively. Now the Director of CAFA's Executive Committee is Yang Li, and the President of CAFA is Professor Pan Gonqkai, a Chinese painting artist and art historian, and Director of CAFA's Academic Board is Professor Jin Shangyi, a well-known Chinese artist.

 

Under the umbrella of CAFA, there are six schools and college,. They are School of Fine Art, School of Chinese Painting, School of Design, School of Architecture, School of Humanities, College of City Design as well as School of Continuing Education and the Affiliated High School of Fine Art. CAFA provides first-rate libraries and studios for students and teachers. What's more, CAFA itself edits, publishes and distributes two nationwide periodicals of Academic Classification A, namely, Art Research and World Art.

 

CAFA's main objectives are the cultivation of high quality professionals, who are able to be elites in the arts, CAFA remains a reasonable scale in terms of space and student number, highlighting its academic, experimental, practicing and multi-disciplinary developments, which should be appropriate to a high art educational infrastructure in a modern era.

 

CAFA provides sound teaching facilities for students and teachers. Each school of CAFA provides special teaching facilities and has its own studios, e.g. oil painting material studio, printmaking studio, product design studio, computer art studio, photography studio, experimental art studio, laboratory of Sculpture Department, laboratory of Mural Painting Department, architecture design studio, Chinese painting imitation room and material fabrication workshop, etc. Besides, they can share public teaching facilities such as multi-media classrooms, language labs and lecture halls, etc.

CAFA’s Library has a long history. As one of the largest professional libraries in China with the richest collected art books, it has made a collection of 360,000 books and paintings of variety kinds, whose special collection includes wood block New Year pictures, string-bound ancient books with illustrations, rubbings from stone-engraved portraits of Han Dynasty, tablets of various dynasties and the first hand copies from engraved seals, etc., and art books and top quality prints of original artworks published in Europe, America and Japan as well.

 

The library has set up reading rooms for art books, social science books and magazines and multi-media reading, which are open or half open to readers. Besides that, the library provides CJFD and CDMD of CNKI, e-books on Shushing website, National Palace Museum-Online and Taiwan Doctor/Master Dissertations Database, etc, and its own fine arts reference full-text database and dissertation names in core journals collected by CAFA, etc.

 

Address: No.8 Hua Jia Di Nan St., Chaoyang District, Beijing