[Photo provided to China Daily]

In 2007, his father got stomach cancer. Lao Shu could not sleep for days, so he picked up the brush he had put aside 20 years earlier and started painting again.

"When I returned, the first thing I painted was an image of Mr Minguo, standing under a tree, without a face. I found this image so interesting that I have kept this painting style ever since." The image of Mr Minguo without facial features has become the signature of Lao Shu's painting.

Drawing Mr Minguo, he says, is a way to help solve his own problems at a spiritual level. "The private life of my generation, born in the 1960s, has endowed itself with too many grand themes: the significance and the value of life, social obligations and undertakings. Around the age of 40, I began feeling disgusted with such a 'collective personality' imposed on individuals, so I retreated to the internal world. I paint because I personally need to express that internal world. Not for anyone or for anything. I only need to be responsible for the specific life of my own. Just like that, safe and sound."