In west Yunnan’s Lianghe County, there is a small alley scrawled with children figures, ponies, birds and thriving plants. These are the artworks of 23 artists from Sichuan, Nanjing, Shanghai and other places across China, and the alley leads to the Xiansheng Academy.

When Xin Wangjun, an artist from east China’s Shangdong province, visited Lianghe in 2015, he was so deeply attracted by Lianghe’s profound culture that he decided to found the Xiansheng Academy.

The Xiansheng Academy is a residential house with a wooden structure. It consists of a movie screening room, an exhibition hall, an art classroom, a reading room, a library, an adult painting room, two guest rooms and a dining room. "The mission of the academy is to offer free art and creative thinking education to children in the surrounding area," said Yin Jialing, now the person in charge of the academy.

The Xiansheng Academy is also a home of arts for left-behind children. During the holidays, art training classes are held, and children create artworks together with artists. In the buildings, pictures are hung on the walls, and most of them were painted by children.

In the past four years, more and more artists, cultural scholars and musicians from home and abroad have come to the Xiansheng Academy in Lianghe to interact with local residents and children. The academy also held an exhibition in Beijing in June 2017. "Maybe what we did is trivial, but we are glad that we can accompany children during their growth,” said Yin Jialing.

Accordingly, the second Xiansheng Academy was established in July 2016 in Qujing, Yunnan province, and the third one was opened to the public in May 2017 in Shouguang, Shandong province, hometown of Xin Wangjun.