Ten influential Chinese are honored at an event for Chinese Culture Figures of 2015. They include Shan Jixiang, director of the Palace Museum..[Photo provided to China Daily]

"I do not agree with reviewers that Peking Opera is outdated or struggling. The opera can also be fashionable and avant-garde, just as the earliest creators intended it to be hundreds of years ago," she says.

Nobel laureate Tsung-Dao Lee was honored at the ceremony for his promotion of science and the arts and Wen Huaisha for his research on Chinese literature and civilization.

Given their ages and physical conditions－Lee is 89 and Wen is 105－the two failed to show up at the ceremony.

Zhang Jie, the president of Shanghai Jiao Tong University, received the award on behalf of Lee.

He says the physicist has a strong interest in the arts and has donated hundreds of his paintings－some visualizing complex physical theories－to the university.

Other winners were artist Yan An (contributions to Sino-Japanese cultural communication), Hong Kong singer Barbara Fei (promoting Hong Kong musicians' links with overseas markets), Tibetan painter Nimazeren (establishing a new school of Tibetan painting) and cultural-relic scholar Tian Jiaqing (an authority on ancient furniture).