The opening exhibition of N3 Gallery, on a quiet street deep in Beijing's 798 Art Zone, is as simple and straightforward as its title, Three Men Exhibition.

It shows dozens of works of three devoted painters: Xia Xiaowan and Ma Ke, both based in Beijing, and Mao Yan from Nanjing, eastern Jiangsu province.

Curator Cui Cancan says the exhibition is not intended to make a strong point: It's to be a sample of the periodic progress of the artists and is far from showing the artists' work overall.

He says the exhibition is to give viewers the sheer pleasure of appreciating a painting in peace and forgetting all the buzz outside.

"The paintings look vivid but cost their creators a lot of time to achieve perfection. They show a born gift and also, years of efforts to accurately present the fleeting inspirations," he says.

The three artists are known for being dissociated with the mainstream discourse of art circles.

Their names are less familiar to the general public if compared to peer artists who are active in exhibiting and various publicity events. In distinctive styles, their works on show capture various moods of people.

Ma, the youngest at 47, shows seven oil paintings produced since 2006 in which the image of an artist recurs to represent himself. In a simple composition, he layers extensive color blocks to create a powerful visual effect and a tense feeling.

Ma says the figure is a wanderer like himself who "is restless wherever he goes and tries to find a feeling of home in the painting". He says the state of wandering can also be found in many people.

Cui says that in an opaque and highly personal style, the painter expresses his understanding of order and conformity of society, and he feels both angry with and passionate about life.

Of Mao's eight portraits on show, seven are his signature Thomas series.

Mao, 49, a teacher at Nanjing University of the Arts, met Thomas Rohdewald, a Luxembourger who came to study Chinese, in 1998.

Since 2000, Mao has been portraying Thomas in his oil paintings. In these portraits, Thomas sometimes slightly closes his eyes, gazes at the audience with a confused expression or looks lost in thought.

"The cooperation (with Thomas) was quite accidental. But as I paint him more, I've found a temperament and a mental state that I feel is ideal," he says.

Mao applies a lot of gray to indicate the sadness and sensitiveness deep in people today. He says he tries to portray his own state on Thomas' face - and also a look that shows the common mentality of people.

Xia creates a strange, magical world in his works. The 58-year-old artist paints deformed human bodies and faces of weird ghosts and deities. He arranges these figures in a dramatic setting like that of a stage. He teaches stage art at the Central Academy of Drama in Beijing.

He says deformation is on one level a personal resistance with a uniform standard; it also indicates people's dissatisfaction with reality.

If you go

10 am-6 pm, through Monday. B08-1, Bei Sanjie Street, 798 Art Zone, Chaoyang district, Beijing.