A dozen of Qi's trademark shaggy dragons are swooping across the huge canvases covering Beijing's concrete walls.[Photo provided to China Daily]

Much like his British counterpart, Qi's work often has a playful feel to it, his paintings incorporating the urban environment around them to allow viewers to see the city with fresh eyes.

Crumbling brickwork is transformed into a crocodile; a demolition notice sprayed onto a local building becomes a Street Fighter-style fireball thrown by a kneeling panda.

"Nature gives me a difficult question, and my work offers a humorous answer," Qi explained in one Weibo post.

But here the similarities with Banksy largely end. Though Qi professes himself to be an admirer of the self-styled vandal's work, he is the product of a very different world from the macho, aggressive British graffiti scene.

Far from being an artistic outsider, Qi graduated from the prestigious China Central Academy of Fine Arts in Beijing, just a few minutes' drive from his basement studio, in 2005.

Refreshingly, he makes no attempt to disguise his familiarity with high art, happily comparing his new focus on street art to the transition from modernism to postmodernism in Western painting.