A Dream of Red Mansions dance drama debuts in New York

"I didn't enter this with a prescribed notion of what the audience should experience," Li told China Daily. "We took a cornerstone of Chinese literature and deconstructed it through a modern aesthetic. What I do know is that love, youth, and fate are universal human experiences."

Li, a graduate of Chinese classical dance at the Beijing Dance Academy, added that playing the role of Jia Baoyu has fundamentally transformed his own artistic and personal worldview.

"Through continuously dancing and performing this role, I've grown closer and closer to him, both emotionally and on an instinctual level," Li said. "It has nourished me, giving me a far deeper perception of life itself. That is something I am profoundly grateful for."

In a striking coincidence, the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York has opened City of Memory: Nanjing in the Seventeenth Century, an exhibition exploring the very birthplace of Cao Xueqin, running through January next year.

While the exhibition focuses on the 17th century, the decades surrounding the violent fall of the Ming dynasty in 1644, it is expected to offer New Yorkers crucial background and an invaluable historical bridge for Cao's 18th-century epic.