Man breaks world record with fingerprint painting

A painting stamped with more than 4.8 million fingerprints and cost over 80,000 yuan ($12,487) in paper has set the Guinness World Record for the largest fingerprint painting.

The fingerprint painting, named Descendants of the Dragon, was created by Kuang Xianpeng, a 35-year-old painter from Zhuzhou, Hunan province. It depicts a mix of nine Chinese dragons and six arts in ancient Chinese culture which are rites, music, archery, chariot, calligraphy and mathematics.

With a surface area of 1195.14 square meters, 51.526 meters long and 23.195 wide, the whole painting used 685 pieces of xuan paper, a paper originating in ancient China for writing and painting, and took Kuang over two years to complete.

It also took 40 volunteers two whole days to lay out the painting for Guinness certification officer to measure.

Kuang said it was a very challenging journey, and he'd used up all his spare time to finish the work. "It was very hard to master the amount of strength you put in your fingers," he told Sanxiang Metropolis Daily. "You can't press too hard or too light, otherwise your prints will blur. I have wasted over 300 pieces of paper due to blurred fingerprints."

The Guinness certification officer Luo Qiong said this world record was not easy to earn. She said each fingerprint must be clear, the painting must have more than four different colors, and the distance between each fingerprint must not exceed 1 centimeter.

The world record for this category had been broken 15 times since 2014, with the previous one set by an Indian with a work measuring 1,188 square meters.

Before this painting, Kuang had spent 14 years in drawing a pen-and-ink painting of 247 meters long and 1.6 meters wide, telling stories of historical myths. He also said he would never stop exploring more creative works.