"A fan is half of an umbrella," Li remembers hearing this saying growing up in Hangzhou city, East China's Zhejiang province, where the rain is copious.

That was in the early 1980s when locally made folding fans with bamboo ribs were exported in large quantities in exchange for foreign currency. Yet, Li had to wait for a few more years for similar products to be sold in local stores. In previous decades, folding fans, considered part of "the trivialities of a bourgeoisie life", had disappeared from view. And when they did reappear, Li the middle-school student immediately bought one.

"I walked through the campus waving a fan, making myself the subject of ridicule for my fellow students," he recalls, laughing.

Having held a small exhibition for his painted fans in June, Li describes his personal style as "merging the traditional with the modern, with an element of quirkiness thrown in".

"As an artist I'm very fond of water. When I'm painting a fan, I love to see water pool up a bit within its pleats," he says.

Next year, he plans to invite a group of artists to Anji county in Zhejiang, where there's a local fanmaking industry. "They'll be painting folding fans with whatever material they choose and in whatever style they prefer," he says.

"I want to show them the various possibilities with a Chinese folding fan."

With that being said, Li notes the folding fans' growing popularity with the younger generation who find them perfect matches for their period costumes. "At the beginning they may simply consider it cool to flutter a fan, like I did in middle school. But eventually some of them will be drawn into the world behind it, where the beauty is in the details," he says.

Asked for an example, Li points to the soft crystalline shimmer given out by the papery surface of a fan. "The effect has resulted from sprinkling and pressing ultrathin flakes of silver onto the pristine paper," he says.

"People call it 'rain and snow'."