Spring Festival is the most important traditional festival in China, spanning about one month. It will end on Lantern Festival, which falls on Tuesday this year.

This is typically the case in North China's Shanxi province, where the festive atmosphere is felt through the mass arrival of people, a booming consumer market, and more importantly, the presentation of colorful culture and traditions.

The festival centers around Chinese New Year's Day, which was celebrated on Feb 17 this year.

On that day, a demonstration of Shanxi-style sugar painting at the Shanxi Grand Theater in the provincial capital of Taiyuan attracted the attention of many people.

Sugar painting is a kind of traditional folk art popular throughout China during traditional festivals. It involves the use of sugar syrup to make a snack with colorful patterns. Shanxi-style sugar painting, which has been inscribed on the provincial list of intangible cultural heritage, is an art combining snack-making, painting, calligraphy and engraving, usually giving an appearance of shadow puppetry or paper-cutting.

Liu Chang, a recognized inheritor and master of the art, showed the audience how the snack was made.

He used a small soup spoon to scoop melted sugar and quickly poured it on a flat stone board to draw a design. Once done, the artist used a small spatula to pick up the sugar painting and placed it on a skewer.