Visitors in front of Lyu's oil work, A Big Rooster, which is inspired by Chinese New Year paintings. [Photos Provided To China Daily]

He especially ponders on how traditions are inherited and merged into people's value systems.

Lyu rose to prominence in the late 1980s.

At a solo exhibition at the National Art Museum of China in 1988, he stunned people with paper-cuts in which he translated the folk art form into a vanguard style.

He drew much attention for repeating in his works the image of "little red man", a common subject in papercuts in northwestern China, which he says symbolize the roots of a civilization.

Born in rural Shandong province, Lyu took an interest in paper-cuts from childhood by watching families and local people in his East China village scissoring beautiful patterns out of paper.

In college, he traveled to northern Shaanxi province where he was influenced by rich folk art. There he learned about shaping human figures from an elderly woman. And in those vivid little paper men he sensed an infinite power that is "universal to early civilizations".

Lyu continuously explores themes using the "little red man" and other folk patterns in his works.