[Photo provided to China Daily]

The inspiration came from the painter's experience when he was a youngster in his hometown, Linqu county in China's Shangdong province. One day, on the way home from collecting firewood, he encountered a newly married woman going to visit her parents. She carried a package wrapped in a cloth with a bright peony flower pattern. As she was walking along, she stopped suddenly, went to the side of road where a wild peach tree was blooming, picked a flower and pinned it to the cloth.

"When looking back," he says, "the scenes of daily life of my childhood were so poetic, exactly like those described in The Book of Songs, a collection of poetry collected by Confucius."

The most striking characteristic of Mr Minguo is that he has no features: no eyes, no eyebrows, no face.

When he started painting in 1979, the figures he drew all had clear, expressive faces. Those figures were so vivid that some commented that his paintings looked like those of the great masters Qi Baishi and Pan Tianshou. On hearing this, Lao Shu was uncomfortable because "those nice words only mean my painting lacks my own style". He stopped painting in 1985.