The Magic Horse of Han Gan

Chen Jiang Hong's The Magic Horse of Han Gan received the Best Children's Picture Book Award at the 2005 Frankfurt Book Fair.

The story depicts a master Chinese painter Han Gan (706–783 AD) who specialized in portraits of horses in China's Tang Dynasty (618-907 AD).

Intelligent and focused, Han couldn't help but sketch a horse after seeing beautiful horses in a customer's backyard where he served as a waiter who had delivered food and drinks. Han's handsomely drawn horse and his concentration aroused the curiosity of one of the guests, who happened to be a great poet at that time, Wang Wei. He later offers the little boy plenty of drawing paper, writing brushes, ink, and pigments.

From then on, Han devoted all his time and energy to observing horses and drawing as vivid of pictures as he could. As his fame spread throughout the country, a grand general asked Han to draw a horse, which comes to life, leaves the painting, and accompanies him onto many battlefields. Chen's story presses on toward a classic conclusion, in which the magic horse escapes from the general's brutality and goes back to Han Gan's painting — if you are too evil, justice turns out to be injustice.

Chen is as much a master of claborate -style painting as his hero is of horse drawings from the Tang Dynasty. Chen's detailed strokes and complicated dyeing skills run parallel with Han's masterpiece horse drawing. And through Chen's use of color, the story's admiration for the Chinese painter is revealed, from the lime-yellow background to red saddles, underscoring Chen's efforts to return to Han's original claborate-style paintings.