Nobility and the art of being young

Color Edu's Study Tour took students to Florence, Italy. [Photo provided to China Daily]

Wang Lijuan, an art student-turned-children's art educator, says that as a child she found it hard to express herself through just one channel.

"Painting of course was something I'm really interested in," says Wang Lijuan, whose engineer father also passed on to her the fervor for handiwork.

"But at the same time I was also fond of singing and taking part in school plays. My father helped me make things using wooden planks and an electric drill."

Two decades later Wang introduced wooden planks and electric drills to her class, for her teenage students who together built a bridge at the center's summer camp in Beijing.

At her place, students adopt a multidisciplinary approach to studying art, an approach that, Wang Lijuan says, "engages all of a child's senses and speaks for who he or she is".

"The art we make must reflect who we are. In other words it's the whole you, as opposed to part of you, that must go into whatever you make."

In one class, students, after being blindfolded, are asked to feel various objects - a grotesquely shaped resin box, for example - with their hands. They are later required to retrieve the shape from memory, by using mud.