Key Chinese exports

Xiao Bai, a 76-year-old composer from Shanghai, labored for 18 years on a single opera. Cheng-Chieh Yu, a 42-year-old L.A.-based choreographer, recently traveled to her hometown, Taipei, where she spent six months creating a work for a Taiwanese dance company. At first glance, it might seem that these two Chinese artists -- of different generations, geographic regions and disciplines -- have little in common.

Bai, Yu and their respective works of art -- both of which will be performed locally this weekend -- belong to the same body of evidence, though: They point to an increasingly vibrant, contemporary and Western-friendly Chinese arts scene, on the mainland and in Taiwan.

Bai's "Farewell My Concubine," at Pasadena Civic Auditorium Saturday and Sunday, marries an ancient Chinese tale to the European operatic tradition. Yu's "Hood, Veil, Shoes," to be performed today and Saturday at UCLA's Glorya Kaufman Hall, merges Western contemporary dance, contact improvisation and a postmodern theatricality with Chinese martial arts and a theme suggested by the vicissitudes of urban transit in Taiwan. Both works, which espouse an unmistakably East-meets-West ethos, premiered to packed audiences in China.

"There is an open market now for art in China. Broadway shows are touring there," says Emily Kuo Vong, the producer of "Farewell My Concubine" and founder of the Chinese American Inter-Cultural Exchange Foundation. "And just look at the Chinese economy. Everything is made in China -- so why not art and why not opera?"

Even in Taiwan, with its history of openness to the West, "there is this new and incredible creative soil," says choreographer Yu, who left Taipei in 1989 and was struck on her return by "how much had changed. The dancers I worked with were so determined to do contemporary work."

Speaking from Shanghai, with Kuo Vong acting as interpreter, Bai manages to breach the language gap when, his voice passionate, he expresses his love of Western opera. "Farewell My Concubine," he says, represents the culmination of a lifelong dream.

"I had always thought that [Western] opera was the grandest of all art forms, so if the Italians and the Germans can have their operas, then why not the Chinese?" he says. "I wanted to put together the tradition of European opera with Chinese history."