Chinese stage actress Huang Xiangli pushed her potential in photography and songwriting projects.
In April 2015, Huang opened her first photography exhibition at the Beijing Fengchao Theatre. Her exhibition was entitled "Heide Baide" which featured a series of large-scaled colored pictures that she took of her friends. The photos were directly extended from negatives and hand-painted with the colorful colors of yellow, green, blue and scarlet.
Huang held her first concert in December 2015 called "The Secret of My Left Hand", along with a group featuring three notable musicians from several Chinese bands.
Huang first tried writing songs when she starred in the one-woman play titled "The Letter from an Unknown Woman." Meng Jinghui, an experienced experimental director directed the drama, which was adapted from Austrian writer Stefan Zweig's novel of the same name.
"The Letter from an Unknown Woman" used three of Huang's compositions. It was initially Meng's idea for Huang to write songs even though the stage actress only knew a few simple chords.
The stage actress started learning to play the guitar in 2011. She learned the skill in preparation for her character for "Rhinoceros in Love," which was directed by Meng.
In an exclusive interview with the Global Times, Huang described taking up songwriting similar to opening a new door in her life. She said that one's potential is ready to be explored as long as one wants to pursue it.
"The Letter from an Unknown Woman" tells of a writer who recollects the past life of a woman he had nearly forgotten. Huang played 10 roles including a teenager, a young woman, an unwed mother, a socialite and a psychopath.
The show was tailored for Huang to star in and has been performed around China nearly 300 times. "The play will exemplify a woman's complicated and torturous feelings about love," Damai China quoted Meng as saying, as cited by Women of China.
In other news, Huang's most recent stage project was in Shanghai where she also played five characters in a one-woman show named "Hello, Sorrow!" The play was adapted from "Bonjour Tristesse" and used one of Huang's compositions together with French lyrics taken from a poem.
Watch the full version of "Rhinoceros in Love" here: