In 2002, Ping Chong was invited by the Washington-based John F. Kennedy Centre for the Performing Arts to visit Xian to meet the Shaanxi Folk Art Theatre. The centre was organising a festival of performing arts from China and wanted to commission Chong to create a puppet theatre performance.
'I was not prepared for what I found when I returned,' says Chong, who had first visited the city in 1990. 'Xian was modernising right before my eyes. Everywhere you turned, a sparkling new building was going up.
'Streets filled with bicycles and pushcarts when I first visited were now jammed with new cars. But amid the rush to modernity and entrepreneurial frenzy, something quintessentially Chinese remained that I connected with.'
The result of the collaboration was Cathay: Three Tales of China, which played in Chong's hometown of New York in 2005. The New York Times described Chong as 'a theatrical magician with heart and an acute sense of history'.
The artist's personal history began in 1946, in Toronto, Canada. His parents were Chinese opera performers from the mainland who had become trapped on a tour to North America by the outbreak of the second world war.
When Chong was two, the family - he has five siblings - moved to New York's Chinatown, where his parents ran a cafe. Chong studied filmmaking and graphic design at the School of Visual Arts and the Pratt Institute and, in 1975, founded Ping Chong & Company (originally called the Fiji Theatre Company). The company's mission is 'to create and tour innovative multidisciplinary works of theatre and art that explore the intersections of history, race, art and technology in the modern world'.