A watery vortex swirls within a giant drum, sucking animals and objects into oblivion as dark clouds discharge spears of lighting. A lone rabbit has escaped the deadly current and tries valiantly to pull other creatures clear. All this is depicted in a painstakingly detailed paper cutout, part of a Lunar New Year exhibition.
'I wanted to take the traditional character of this zodiac animal - symbolising creativity, vitality and kindness - and remake it as a modern-day hero that saves the world,' says paper artist Bovey Lee of her hand-cut work, Rescue Mission, which she created in 2009. It is 'something you wouldn't expect a rabbit to do'.
Raised in Hong Kong and now living in Pittsburgh, in the United States, Lee is on a rescue mission of her own - trying to bring this dying Chinese art form into the 21st century with her own techniques and subjects.
Born in 1969 to a middle-class family, Lee was encouraged to pursue her interest in art by her father, an interior designer who has since retired. But even he was surprised when, in 1993 and after completing a fine arts degree at the Chinese University of Hong Kong, she upped sticks and moved to the US to enrol in a masters programme at the University of California, Berkeley.
'At that point, he didn't think I was actually going to try to make a career out of it,' she says. 'Plus, there weren't any masters of fine art offered in Hong Kong. But I just wouldn't give up.'
After getting a degree in traditional Western art media and a short teaching stint at UC Santa Barbara, Lee pursued a master's in digital arts at New York's Pratt Institute, then headed back to university to teach.
'I was teaching art for 10 years after I graduated,' she says. 'In the beginning, I thought I could have an art career and teach at the same time, which a lot of people do. Teaching is a very honourable career. I had the fortune to have great teachers in my life. It wasn't until I started doing paper-cutting, which is so time consuming, that I needed total focus to make it happen.'