Wang Xi'an and her daughter Hu Xiaoshan cut red squares of paper, while chatting with guests.

A few minutes and several scissor snips later, they hold up their handiworks.

Wang's creation shows four people joining hands, while Hu has cut out two intricate butterflies.

"I'm too old to make patterns with too many details," the mother says.

"My eyesight is going."

But Wang's works display a genuine and earthy quality that speaks to the indigenous culture of Shaanxi province's Yan'an.

That's exactly why the city's government has named Wang a candidate of the national representative inheritor of Ansai paper-cutting.

The 55-year-old started learning the folk art from her grandmother at age 12. She went on to win dozens of national and provincial prizes for both her paper-cuttings and her "farmer paintings", which is a folk art form appearing in the 1980s and derived from mural paintings and paper-cutting.

She is the first paper-cutting artist to appear on CCTV's New Year gala and has traveled to the Philippines and Germany to demonstrate the traditional craft.

Her works usually depict everyday activities, such as carrying water, farming and cooking. They also portray special occasions, such as weddings and festivals, in the rural northwestern Chinese style.

She says nearly 10,000 visitors, mostly artists and art students, have visited her home since the local government allowed her family to receive foreign visitors in Ansai.

"My daughter majored in English to help me communicate with foreign guests," she says.

Despite the acclaim surrounding her work, she considers paper-cutting a hobby rather than a profession, she says. And she has never gotten bored with it.

"When I was young, I could spend a whole day cutting," she says.

"Now, I can do it for three or four hours a day."

She didn't sell any until the mid-1980s.

Hu is the only one of Wang's four children who learned the folk art from her mother.

The 27-year-old started studying it at age 10. She started working as a professional paper-cutter and painter in 2003 in Shaanxi's capital Xi'an.

But she now works with her mother at home in Yan'an.

"We don't worry about the market for our paper-cutting and farmer paintings," the daughter says.

They can sell more than 1,000 albums of their small paper-cuttings a year.

"Most of our customers are art dealers in Yan'an and Xi'an," Hu says.

"We charge more than 100 yuan per album. We charge a few thousand yuan for one of my mom's large-sized works. But we can usually only sell one every few months."