The first Chinese painter to hold an exhibition at the United Nations Headquarters was Bai Gengyan.
Bai Gengyan, whose ancestral home is Jingxian County, Hebei Province, was born in Dezhou City, Shandong Province in 1940. He graduated from Tianjin Academy of Fine Arts in 1962 and stayed at the school to teach. He has served as a professor, master's tutor, and national art exhibition judge at Tianjin Academy of Fine Arts. During his teaching career at the Academy of Fine Arts, he played an important role in the formation of the teaching system. In the same year, he studied landscape, calligraphy, and painting theory under the tutelage of Mr. Wang Songyu. His landscape paintings inherited the tradition and took the advantages of Western painting, which are simple, heavy, and smooth in momentum.