China Central Academy of Fine Arts

The Central Academy of Fine Arts, located in Beijing, the capital of China, is an academy where culture, history and art are flourishing, which enjoys the best art resources of the world. CAFA, as a leading institution for modern art education in China, provides a rich land for those who wish to learn experience and engage in creativities, which has nurtured quite a lot of pre-eminent artists in the past ninety years.

The Central Academy of Fine Arts (CAFA), the only art academy of higher learning directly under the Ministry of Education, was founded in April 1950 by incorporating the National Beiping Art College and the Fine Arts Department of Huabei University. Chairman Mao Zedong inscribed the name for the Academy. The National Beiping Art College could trace its roots back to the National Beijing Art College, the first national art education institution in Chinese history as well as the beginning of modern art education in China, which was founded in 1918 under the initiative of the well-known educationist Cai Yuanpei. Such known artists as Xu Beihong, Jiang Feng, Wu Zuoren, Gu Yuan and Jin Shangyi, etc., were presidents of CAFA successively.

Under the umbrella of CAFA, there are six schools and college,. They are School of Fine Art, School of Chinese Painting, School of Design, School of Architecture, School of Humanities, College of City Design as well as School of Continuing Education and the Affiliated High School of Fine Art. CAFA provides first-rate libraries and studios for students and teachers. What's more, CAFA itself edits, publishes and distributes two nationwide periodicals of Academic Classification A, namely, Art Research and World Art.

CAFA's main objectives are the cultivation of high quality professionals, who are able to be elites in the arts, CAFA remains a reasonable scale in terms of space and student number, highlighting its academic, experimental, practising and multi-disciplinary developments, which should be appropriate to a high art educational infrastructure in a modern era.