Zhang Guangyu was creative while painting with watercolors, and making illustrations and cartoons, as well as designing animation characters. [Photo provided to China Daily]

"What Disney did then were the same things that Zhang had done or was doing at the same time," Li says. (This is because) Shanghai was in a narrow gap between Paris and New York in the 1930s. The fashions of Paris and New York would appear in Shanghai's streets in just a day or two.

"The values Zhang created for Chinese art are no less than what Disney did for his land."

A four-volume publication, titled Complete Collections of Zhang Guangyu, was published in September. At a discussion on the book, its chief editor Tang Wei said that Zhang believed the paths of art should be wide and interlinked, but he didn't mean that Chinese artists adopt foreign ideas without choice or without criteria.

"He believed Chinese artists should fuse useful elements from outside while not losing our own cultural identity.

"Zhang was an artist with a pretty clear mind. He said that to create art, one can't be a selfish person, otherwise, one is 'planting the seeds of evil in this world'," Tang adds.