In this paper, a novel four-dimensional chaotic system for generating multi-wing chaotic attractors is proposed, and chaotic and hyper-chaotic attractors are generated in different parameters. Besides, basic dynamical properties of the chaotic system, such as equilibrium point Poincaré mapping, dissipativity, power spectrum, Lyapunov exponent spectrum, bifurcation diagram are studied numerically and theoretically. An analog oscillator circuit is designed for implementing the four-wing hyper-chaotic attractors, and the hardware circuit experimental results are shown to be in good agreement with the numerical simulation results. Finally, the four-wing hyper-chaotic system is used for hybrid image encryption of physical chaos encryption and advanced encryption standard encryption algorithm. Because physical chaos is adopted in this system, there does not exist a definitive relationship between plaintexts and ciphertexts. And the statistical characteristics of ciphertexts should be better than those of any other encryption system.