Solar images with high spatial resolution, high temporal resolution across a large field of view (FoV) are aspired for solar physics and space weather. Ground-based high spatial resolution imaging of the Sun is severely limited by wavefront disturbances induced by the Earth’s atmosphere turbulence. Therefore, solar adaptive optics aims at these requirements and it has revitalized ground-based solar astronomy at existing telescopes. Meanwhile, multi-conjugate adaptive optics has been proved to overcome the anisoplanatism and obtain the high resolution images with a large field of view in solar observation by compensating for the turbulence with several deformable mirrors conjugated to different heights. In this review, we give some summarization of the development of solar adaptive abroad, and emphatically introduce several adaptive optics systems in China and the progress of large FoV adaptive optics.