What's on

Raising the flag

During the many years he kept guard on the Kaishan, a remote, barren island about 12 nautical miles from Yanwei Port, East China's Jiangsu province, Wang Jicai, the island's fifth militia sentry director, and his wife Wang Shihua would raise the national flag, at 7 am every day, before their inspection. He was not even 30 years old when reporting for the first day of duty on the island, and he died while on duty at the age of 58 in 2018.

The flag he once raised, a witness to his dedication and resilience, is now on show at a long-term exhibition at the National Museum of China in Beijing, which marks the 75th anniversary of the founding of the People's Republic of China.

On exhibition are red flags — including the national flags of China and the flags of the Communist Party of China — as well as photos and documents that trace the country's revolutionary progress since the 20th century, and how the course shaped the designs of the national flag and the CPC flag.

9 am-5 pm, closed on Mondays. 16 East Chang'an Avenue, Dongcheng district, Beijing. 010-6511-6400.

Shadow art

From Tradition to Modern is an exhibition that surveys the evolution, preservation and revival of Chinese shadow puppetry, which is a popular form of folk art and entertainment that integrates handicrafts, local operas and light manipulation on a miniature stage that has over time developed into different styles from region to region.

The long-term exhibition at the Crafts Museum of China Academy of Art, in Hangzhou, East China's Zhejiang province, gathers more than 300 puppets from across the country, from the collection of the China Academy of Art, as well as videos of puppet shows and puppet animations.

It navigates the audience from the past to the present on which artists and craftsmen have worked together to introduce modern art and design into the renaissance of shadow puppetry, to cater to the cultural needs of people today.

9:30 am-4:30 pm, closed on Mondays. CAA Xiangshan Campus, 352 Xiangshan Village, Xihu district, Hangzhou, Zhejiang province. 0571-8716-4613.

Embracing nature

Tianjin Museum is running the Nature and Art exhibition, displaying a selection of classic Chinese landscape paintings in its collection. More than half of the works featured at the long-term exhibition are being shown for the first time.

The exhibition is dedicated to the mountain-and-water genre of Chinese painting in the late Qing Dynasty (1644-1911) of which the influence of the Four Wangs — leading landscape artists surnamed Wang in the early Qing era, namely Wang Shimin, Wang Jian, Wang Hui and Wang Yuanqi — was still a key element of the work of ink painters.

Meanwhile, regional painting groups also emerged at the time to reflect social transformations and people's changing tastes of art and culture, such as the rise of the Shanghai School (called Haipai in Chinese) which saw artists create to address a modernist tendency embraced by city dwellers.

9 am-4:30 pm, closed on Mondays. 62 Pingjiang Dao, Hexi district, Tianjing.022-8388-3000.