Video-game imagery is at the heart of artist Feng Mengbo's work,although he says passion guides him to create. Chen Nan reports.

Feng Mengbo says his artistic identity is shaped by his obsession with video games and the heroes of his childhood. Walking into his house, it's obvious that Feng enjoys playing video games. He has purchased three large-sized game machines that were made in Japan and cost more than 10,000 yuan ($1,500) each. Various video game character models are lined up on desks.

"I am living with them," says the 45-year-old artist of his model collection.

For Feng, video games are far more than entertainment - they exemplify his lifelong fascination with heroes, from the characters in computer games to kungfu star Bruce Lee.

Among the heroes that inspired Feng were the Chinese Red Army soldiers who made the epic Long March in the mid-1930s.

"I grew up with the story of the Long March, from movies to books. Those soldiers are my heroes.

"As part of my education at school, I was told that heroism was sublime and everyone should learn from these heroes," he recalls. "I believe that people of my age all have a certain connection with the soldiers."

After studying traditional Chinese painting and printmaking at Central Academy of Fine Arts, Feng created 42 oil paintings titled Long March in 1993, to depict the major scenes of the historic journey, including crossing the snowy mountains, grassland, and an important battle at Luding Bridge.

The paintings launched Feng onto the international art scene. However, what was on his mind was not moving forward to the next project but going back to his original love, video games.

In the 1980s, Feng, who was born and grew up in Beijing, came across the first generation of video games, which had been imported from Japan and were popular among young Chinese.

Like other youngsters, Feng became obsessed with video games. Unlike them, though, he started to think about designing a video game himself and later used its imagery.

"Ever since I started playing video games, I wanted to create one myself and the main characters are definitely the soldiers of the Long March," Feng says.

In 1993, he got his first computer and while painting at school, he started to learn how to use design software and create works. His first work was My Private Album, a presentation of his own family history.

Then, with a more advanced computer, Feng combined the games he played and traditional Chinese culture, such as Taking Mount Doom by Strategy, a mix of the traditional Chinese opera Taking Tiger Mountain by Strategy and the video game DOOM. He also inserted himself into imagery from the popular video game Quake III and created a digital movie, Q3, in 1999.

After spending years developing computer-game-based artworks, Feng returned to more traditional forms, including the Long March theme with Long March: Restart, a project that has been 14 years in the making, partially due to technology constraints. It was finally finished in 2008.

"The paintings in 1993 were a preview of the Long March: Restart. I called the paintings 'game snapshots'," Feng says. "It's a kind of combination of my beloved things, presenting my heroes through the video game medium."

Feng makes the central characters, the Red Army soldiers, fight against various demons. By playing the game, users review the Long March and play the roles of the heroes themselves.

His 25-meter-long digital wall installation, Long March: Restart, made its US debut at New York in 2010. He was also invited to participate at this year's Coachella Music Festival and displayed the digital wall in a tent.

"I am not a video game designer. I always think that video games are pieces of art themselves," Feng says.

An admirer of Chairman Mao Zedong and Chinese culture, he has created a 3D computer model of Mao, in which he mixes modern technology and painting.

Another project was an effort to move painting forward as an art form. Influenced by traditional Chinese landscape painting, he used software originally designed to build 3D landscapes for films, to create the type of Chinese landscapes depicted in traditional paintings.

As the professor of the new media department of the Central Academy of Fine Arts, Feng says that he doesn't like the tag "new media" because it limits creativity.

"Passion is the best motive to create art. Any definition categorizes art and artists' imagination," he says. "I admire those heroes who created Chinese history so my artworks are created out of pure love for them."