Growing up in rural Jiangsu Province, Yu Jigao showed a strong interest in fine arts at an early age and studied on his own for years. His hard work paid off later. In the early 1950s, he made his way to Nanjing Normal University, where he learned painting theories and techniques from some famous artists. It was then that Yu found his lifelong artistic zeal for gongbi. Gongbi paintings usually describe birds and flowers, symbols of beauty and joy, in an artistic way with intense color.

After graduation from the art school in 1957, Yu began his professional career at the Chinese Painting Institute of Jiangsu. He has since published a series of art collections. Since 1959, Yu has contributed a series of works to many important sites. Yu’s works have also been displayed in a range of national and international exhibitions. From 1986 to 1997, he held his exhibitions in such places as Beijing, Guangzhou and New York. Both the themes and artistic techniques have won widespread praise in the past years.

While observing traditional rules, he uses accurate lines, powerful brush movements as well as the interplay between dark and light to represent the harmony of nature. Though he adopts a realistic style, he tries to enrich his works with spiritual beauty through his brush. Yu says, “That feeling turns into the images of singing birds and elegant flowers in my paintings.” Thanks to his careful observation of nature and artistic sensitivity, Yu is able to combine realistic description with artistic expression in his brushwork.

Now as deputy director of the Academy of Chinese Gongbi Painting of Flowers and Birds and a national top-level artist, Yu maintains a simple and easy-going style. In addition to artistic creation, Yu has devoted himself to promoting his painting style as the cultural heritage of China. “Art is part of my life,” Yu says. “I am proud to be a flower-bird painter. I hope to create a bright future for it through my efforts.”

From airplanes to apartments, most spaces are now designed with sound-absorbing materials that help decrease various sounds of everyday life. But most of the sound-absorbing materials that can cancel out human voices, traffic noise and music are made from plastic foams (泡沫) that aren’t easily recycled or degraded. Now, researchers reporting in ACS Sustainable Chemistry & Engineering have created a biodegradable film (薄膜) obtained from seaweed, which effectively absorbs sounds in this range.

Controlling and optimizing the way sound moves throughout a room is key to creating functional spaces. Foam sound-absorbing panels are a common solution, and they come in a variety of materials and thicknesses tailored to specific sound requirements. Most of these foams, however, are made from a type of plastic material and other chemical substances that are obtained from natural-oil or petrol. To avoid petrochemicals, researchers have explored more renewable sources and biodegradable sound-absorbing alternatives. But many current options are made from plant fibers that don’t effectively decrease noises in the most useful range of sound frequencies, or they are too thick or difficult to produce. So, Chindam’s team wanted to develop a biodegradable material from a plant, which would be simple to produce and could absorb a range of sounds.

The team created films of agar (琼脂), a material that comes from seaweed, along with other additives developed from plants and varied the thickness of the films. After running the materials through a battery of tests, the researchers measured how well the films reduced sound across a range of frequencies. To do this, the team created a sound tube in which a speaker is placed at one end, and the test film is fitted over the other end. Microphones in the middle of the tube measured the amount of sound sent by the speaker and the amount of sound reflected off the film. These experiments showed that the films with many small holes made with the highest concentrations of agar had the greatest sound-absorbing qualities and per-formed similarly to traditional sound-absorbing foams. The researchers plan to explore ways to change the agar films to give them other desirable properties, such as flame resistance, and will explore other biologically obtained film materials.