Broader perspective

At the exhibition, there were two owls she created at different stages. The one with feet resembling those of a cat was one of her early works.

She was inspired by a visit to the National Museum of China in Beijing in 2011, where she saw an eagle-shaped pottery vessel from Yangshao Culture (a key Neolithic culture dating back 5,000 to 7,000 years across the northern part of China). "The eagle's feet drew me out of Western aestheticism," she recalled.

Another owl she created earlier this year had a pair of sharp claws.

"The previous owl is gentle like in a fairy tale, but this one may bite people," she said, adding that she created the latter owl during a period when she fiercely defended her son from being bullied at school.

"I've changed a lot in the past two years. As I get more experience from different projects, I realize that I can do so many things. I did many things for this exhibition."

Her eyes glistened.

In the Pomegranate Courtyard, Liaoliao exhibited her later works. An important part was those she created for Yuefu, a poetry collection featuring works from the Han Dynasty (206 BC-AD 220) to the end of the Six Dynasties period (from the 3rd to 6th centuries).

Creating illustrations for the ancient poems gave her a chance to walk out of self-expression and to think about how to translate the poetic lines into the paper-cut language, how to represent the clouds, the wind, the water or a psychological state in a language she found little reference in the books about traditional Chinese paper-cuttings she had read, she said.

In Yuefu, there is a poem titled Hao Li, which in ancient times meant a place where people's souls lived after death.

"I worked really hard on this work. It used to be fancy with ghosts spiraling upward, but it didn't match the poem's mood — a peaceful, somewhat distant feeling in a place filled with souls," she said.

In the second version, she drew a big tree in the middle and two little cute ghosts sitting on it. It was too lively, neither right, she said.

"This is the third version. I cut all unnecessary elements, trying to be accurate," she explained.

"While I made these works, it's like I was having cross-temporal dialogue with ancient people."

Chen Lingyun, editor-in-chief of publishing company Cuneiform in Beijing, was among the first visitors to the exhibition.

His first encounter with Liaoliao's paper-cutting was one piece depicting a carp holding up clouds with a small pavilion on top.

"I felt the charming simplicity in her work, different from the folk style of traditional paper-cutting," he said.

When he saw her works for Yuefu, he felt her works "resonated with the archaic innocence of those ancient verses while retaining her own delicate ingenuity", he said.

Apart from the carp piece, he was particularly fond of one named Jiangnan, an illustration for a poem of the same title, in which she depicted the line "lotus leaves everywhere, fish playing among them".

"The entire work portrays a sea of lotus leaves with varying sizes, lotus flowers, and swimming fish, seemingly endless yet simple and direct, which I really like," he said.

"Paper-cutting often gives a fragile impression, but Liaoliao's precise knife work endows her pieces with a simple and resolute quality akin to Han Dynasty stone carvings," he added.