The Department of Art Education, originally named the Normal Department of Art, was founded in 1981. It was one of the art education majors established earlier in the new period of reform and opening among the eight institutes of fine arts nationwide. The first dean was Mr. Guo Shaogang, the famous art educator and oil painting artist. Then Professor Hu Juzhan, Yu Bingzheng and Wu Zhengbin took the position in succession and now the dean is Professor Zhang Hong. A batch of remarkable artists, such as Wang Zhaomin, the great master of contemporary oil painting, and Jiang jin, the famous crafts and traditional Chinese painting artist, have made significant contributions to the establishment and development of our department.

The Department of Art Education opens five majors for the undergraduate students, which are Art Education, Water Color Painting, Exhibition Design, Comprehensive Art, Photography and Digital Art. At present, the Department has totally 753 undergraduate students and 40 postgraduate students. The specialties and framework of teaching, researching and administration are shown as the following illustration.

The Department of Art Education is manned with a team of vital teaching staff who integrate middle-aged teachers and young teachers as the main body. Currently there are 45 specialized teachers under the department’s regular payroll and more than 20 external teachers. Among them, three are professors and 19 are associate professors. For the teachers under the regular payroll, 58% have the Master’s degree and two have the Doctor’s degree. The teachers of our department graduated from varied universities. There are some from institutes of fine arts and comprehensive universities in Mainland China, some from University of Tsukuba in Japan and University of Sydney in Australia.

The Department of Art Education has specialized rooms for teaching and administrative usages, with an area of 12000 m2. There are wood carving lab, lacquer painting lab and photography lab, all with advanced equipments. There are totally 47 specialized classrooms, among which 19 are mass media classrooms with 600 seats and per hundred students can have 80 seats. Besides the shared library, stadium and campus Internet of the Academy, according to the specialized features of the Department of Art Education, we set up our own reference library, with 4000 volumes of books and 68 periodicals of various kinds.