The base layer: a bucket worth of blue paint poured onto a vertical canvas. Then: A spray of white roses, serving as a paintbrush, is dipped in a different shade of blue and whacked on with full force. Mixed into this 30-second video of Zhao Xiaoli’s visceral painting process are a few more shots of her fixing the details, scattered with unrelated shots for mood—of flowers crushed in hands or burnt, lighted candles flickering on a palette, Zhao herself shedding a single tear in a mirror.

The end product is two-fold: a blue-toned portrait of a young girl similar to Zhao’s popular pink-toned painting Burning Kite; and the video itself, which ends with Zhao posing beside the painting in stylish clothes. It’s paired with moody music and a title (“The ocean today is not blue #BurningKite”), and has 136,000 “likes” on short-video platform Douyin at the time of writing.

Some view her oil paintings as kitsch, but Zhao Xiaoli is now a force to be reckoned with on Chinese social media. In just two-and-a-half years, she has amassed 10.27 million followers on short-video platform Douyin (closing in on the 11.2 million of Instagram’s most-followed artist, Banksy) and 92.5 million total likes, and touched off a debate on the blurring lines between art and trend in China today.

Her followers are as enthusiastic as they are numerous. “Looking at her works is like seeing through my own state of mind,” a fan of Zhao’s tells TWOC via Weibo, the microblogging platform where she shared photos of herself next to a Zhao Xiaoli painting she received with delight as a Lunar New Year’s gift. On Instagram, where Zhao has 1 million followers, Pavel Liu, chief advisor at Japan-based 365 Art Business magazine, raves to TWOC in a message ending with 10 exclamation marks and 19 emojis: “Her time and effort spent on each scene is fascinating…[Her paintings are] masterpieces that will take their rightful place in the history of human art!”

Zhao attributes her initial success to how proletarian her work is. “It makes art accessible to ordinary people,” she tells TWOC over the phone.

The 32-year-old oil painter, who originally studied animation and illustration design, and decided to pursue a career in art despite her parents’ wish for her to become a civil servant, shot to fame on Douyin in October 2019. Her early videos were slower-paced and much less frantic than her most recent updates, and showed her working with abandoned objects: Vermeer’s Girl with a Pearl Earring drawn with a lipstick allegedly gifted from an ex, or a neighbor’s shabby old chair transformed with painted flowers. A 2020 article by China Daily extolled her as an artist who “makes art out of garbage.”