Cao Xiuwen, a native Jinshan peasant, is putting patches of pink, bright red, yellow and white on a drawing she finished a few days earlier. A Malaysian businesswoman is so impressed she has bought the unfinished work, which depicts a mother cooking in a traditional kitchen.
Firmly built, with short hair and dark skin, the straight-talking Cao, 52, hardly fits the conventional image of an artist. She was a herb picker before receiving a year of training in painting in the late 1970s, having acquired some basic drawing techniques from an arts professor who was ordered to receive 're-education' from farmers during the Cultural Revolution.
'I was born into a peasant family. My father was good at wood carving and my mum liked to embroider pillows and mosquito nets. I was interested in painting when I was a child, but they were too poor to let me learn,' she says.
'I remember it was 1974, when I heard a painter was in our village to receive peasants' re-education. I went to him and asked him to teach me. In the daytime, my teacher learned from us and in the evenings I went to learn painting from him.'
Painting initially earned her a small measure of fame and, later, a stable living. She bore a red flag for the Shanghai Women's Day in 1978 and, a year later, for the nation.
Three decades on, Cao is the country's best-known 'peasant painter', her works sought after by museums and collectors.