He adds that his goal is to allow both the singers and the audience to experience the beauty and pain common to all human beings.

"The fact that the roots of pain, introduced in this Greek mythology and interpreted in an opera more than 250 years old, reappear in the East in the fate of an ordinary villager in China can make us continually ponder the redemptive qualities of humanity," he says.

It is the 45-year-old artist's first foray into theater.

A 450-year-old ancestral hall from Zhejiang province is one of the highlights of the opera.

In the early 1990s, Zhang worked as temporary assistant to the set and lighting designer on director Lin Zhaohua's play Three Sisters Waiting for Godot, in Beijing. After moving to New York he worked on Chen Shizheng's Lincoln Center production Peony Pavilion and contributed to one of Robert Wilson's experimental works.

Despite hesitations in the beginning, the bold artist who is famous for his controversial performance art, says he was drawn to the challenge of doing something he had not done before and knew little about.

"Honestly, I don't understand opera and know little about Baroque music, but I like to do things out of the ordinary," Zhang says.

"I never imagined I would have the chance to be director and set designer for a Western opera, because it is so foreign to me.

"But I think it was my theater experience and many years of practice as a performance and visual artist that just might have given me the guts today to stand on the stage and show people what I know about opera, what I know about the story of Semele."