Yang Yong wields her scissors as a master artist wields his brushes, tiny cutout upon tiny cutout, until she attains a masterpiece collage of intricacy and subtlety that awes the viewer, writes Zhou Tao.

Peking Opera actresses in gorgeous costumes, belles in qipao, minority group girls with elaborate silver headdress and Japanese geisha in kimono - all intricately composed by the self-taught artist Yang Yong patiently wielding her scissors.

These extraordinarily detailed pictures, in the exhibit "Beauty of the Orient," are collages of hundreds of tiny pieces of paper cut from newspapers and fine magazines and pieced together with patience and perseverance to create stunning effects.

Yang's perspectives and creations, like those of many other female artists, are idealized or focus on daily life. She finds artificial pearls, crystals and rubies and embeds them in her subjects' exquisite costumes.

Actually Yang has no formal education in fine arts and she only undertook this project in paper and scissors art a year and a half ago.

"I didn't learn art in university and my work has absolutely nothing to do with art," Yang emphasizes. "I do it like child's play for fun."

The 30 pieces on display at the Room with a View gallery represent Yang's time-consuming recreation. She finds it luxurious.

A graduate in Chinese literature from Sichuan Province, Yang never stopped fantasizing about art. The problem was finding the right medium through which to express herself.

One day she chanced upon a collage using magazine and newspaper - and something clicked. "Recycling is very environment-friendly," she adds.

Among the works, four are her early explorations of paper and scissor art - two unstructured collages and two other van Gogh-like twisted, disturbed strokes of the night sky.

Yang scissored the paper into equal-sized curved slices to form twisted clouds and landscape. Later, she created figures of Chinese women as well as Japanese, in the Yamato-e style, thinking her Japanese businessman husband.

Though Yang was brought up in Sichuan, she was born in Guizhou, a southwestern region where there are many minority groups with colorful clothing and silver or silver-like jewelry and head ornaments.

Yang uses aluminum foil and scissors it into tiny pieces, the size of fingernail clippings, for the silver headgear and embroidery at the neck, the sleeves and hem of the garments worn by subjects of her works.

Collage is widely used as mixed-media art, but works such as Yang's "Beauty of the Orient" are rarely seen because they require so much patience and effort, compared with many popular works that are full of haste.

Beauty of the Orient
Date: through December 8, 3-11pm
Address: 12/F, 479 Nanjing Rd E.
Tel: 021-63520256