Wu Weishan, director of the National Art Museum of China, says a lot of people begin to get a sense of aesthetics and learn about art from illustrations.

"When I was a small child, I was attracted to the drawings in old books at home, and that was when I first felt an interest in fine arts," he recalls.

Wu Weishan says illustrations are a unique form of fine arts that have played an important role in forming people's aesthetic views for generations. He says although small in size, these works embody an admiration of beauty in nature, a pursuit of high morality and a call to pass on the excellent values and beliefs that have been preserved over the course of Chinese history.

The current exhibition shows that drawings are an integral part of the experience when people encounter literary classics for the first time.

Perhaps the foremost illustrations on display include those featured in Journey to the West, the 16th-century mythological novel written by Wu Cheng'en, Diary of a Madman in which Lu Xun, a leading modern literary figure, bitterly criticized the severe impact of feudal values on people, and Marriage of Xiao Erhei, a work produced in 1943 by noted novelist Zhao Shuli about a young couple fighting for the free right to marry.