A dance performance taken from the poetic dance drama Poetic Dance: The Journey of a Legendary Landscape Painting（《只此青绿》）has been considered the most amazing program at the CCTV Spring Festival Gala.

The creators of the poetic dance drama got inspiration from a great ancient Chinese painting, A Panorama of Mountains and Rivers（《千里江山图》） by Wang Ximeng. Wang was a painter from the Song Dynasty. He spent half a year finishing the painting when he was only 18. Now the painting is at the Palace Museum. It has been on show to the public only four times since 1949. The 11.9-meter-long painting is a record of people’s lives and the natural scenery including mountains, rivers and villages of that time.

The poetic dance drama tells the story of a researcher from the Palace Museum who has spent all his time studying the painting. We can follow him to the moment when Wang was about to finish the artwork. “It is not to tell people how great the painting is, but to help people understand traditional Chinese culture,” says Xie Suhao, who plays the character.

Since last August, the dance poetic drama has been played more than 50 times in over 18 cities in China. “I hope our dance can be performed on more and bigger stages to show more people all over the world a beautiful China with a mix of old and new,” says Meng Qingyang, the lead dancer of Poetic Dance: The Journey of a Legendary Landscape Painting.

Art, to many, is a human expression of creativity. But in recent years, you may have read news about AI（人工智能）creating its own art, such as painting or writing poems. Some people worry that AI might someday replace artists.

But this worry seems to be unnecessary, at least for now. Many artists today are turning AI into a useful tool. Instead of replacing artists, AI is bringing artists more possibilities.

A piece of music created by AI recently attracted attention. AI was used to turn the virus into a piece of nearly two-hour long music. The project was led by a scientist and he tried a special note in each amino acid（氨基酸）. The AI then translated these notes into music.

Listeners found the project to be unbelievable. “It allows me to see the virus in a new way,” said one listener. This surprising marriage between science and art could not be achieved without AI. As a scientist wrote, “AI helps artists play around in creative ways, making things possible beyond what they have ever thought before.”

AI can also take care of repetitive tasks for artists. For example, in the comic and animation（动画）industries, there are now AI tools that can color in black-and-white line drawings. It could give artists room to experiment, by cutting down the time it takes to color each frame.

As Peter Ward wrote for The Culture Trip, art of every kind has always been influenced by technology. AI can become a useful tool to bring change to the art world if it’s welcomed and not feared.