LI Ruiding, 56, is one of the most influential and successful costume designers in China. But after cementing his reputation with his costumes for the opening and closing ceremonies of the 2008 Beijing Olympics and the opening ceremony of the World Expo Shanghai 2010, the famed designer is pushing into new frontiers with a lavish stage show in China’s far west.

Many of Li’s stage garments employ artistic exaggeration to represent Chinese history and culture. But with over 200 shows to his credit, Li also knows how to use destruction as a creative force and toy with audience expectations.

“The right design is somewhere between the familiar and the unfamiliar. It subtly caters to a common aesthetic but at the same time tries to be out-of-the-box. To achieve this, I must first deconstruct that which is being depicted,” Li explains in an exclusive interview with Shanghai Daily in the Xinjiang Uygur Autonomous Region.

Li is in Xinjiang for the debut of “Qianhui Xiyu” (or “Back to the Far West”), a six-act multimedia stage show centered around the origin and development of the Silk Road.

The show features some 2,000 costumes and 10,000 accessories designed by Li over the course of two years.

These items are worn by performers throughout the show, which features folk dances from China’s various ethnic groups such as the Uygur, Kazakh and Hui, as well as singing, ballet and acrobatics numbers.

Human performers represent only one part of the grand spectacle though — the show is complemented by a 2,000-square-meter screen as well as a veritable menagerie of live animals, including horses, camels and a trained hawk. The show is running at the Xinjiang Grand Theater, which currently boasts the tallest dome in China.

“Nowadays there’s more focus on costumes ... The audience’s eyes are drawn to the actors and actresses, who demonstrate the costumes,” Li explains.

But while the show’s monumental scale presented its own host of challenges for the designer, Li’s Han ethnicity was another source of pressure, at least at first.

“Xinjiang locals, many of whom are not Han, doubted whether I could represent their culture in the right way. They even asked to censor my designs but were refused by the director, who sees the show as an art performance targeting a global audience,” he says.

Other locals though, after seeing Li’s aidelai — a distinctive form of silk used in traditional Uygur clothing — praised his designs for being more beautiful than their own.

Reinterpreting aidelai

Li discovered aidelai while doing field research for the show. He was struck by the colorful, beautiful material which he saw worn by many Uygur women.

Li eventually used aidelai in several of the show’s pieces. One such material features peacock-like stripes intended to dazzle the eye with color as the performers dance and spin.

“When I designed those skirts and dresses, all my memories of visiting Urumqi, of seeing the local clothing and the local way of life, came together into a three-dimensional image,” Li recalls.

The noble, elegant ways of the region’s Uygur people also inspired his designs as he sat down at his drafting table.

But Li’s costumes were crafted with more than just visual appeal in mind. They were also envisioned as functional pieces that would allow for — and accentuate — the movements of the dancers on stage.

Such concerns, Li stresses, mark a key difference between fashion and costume design. Sometimes the most beautiful parts of a custom are only visible when a dancer jumps, spins or kicks, he adds. Even then, such details might only be meaningful to an audience when dozens of dancers are performing together.

For example, one set of costumes in the show features yellow-to-white gradient silk. When the dancers wave their arms together, their costumes represent the sun reflecting on Tianchi, an alpine lake in Xinjiang.

“It’s important for a costume designer to understand lighting, music and most importantly, dancing. I was a ballet dancer for many years, and by knowing the range of each dance movement I know how to make the dancers look glamorous,” Li explains.

In another example, Li mentions the huxuan dance, a type of spinning dance which originated in the West and then traveled to Xinjiang via the Silk Road. Those performing this dance wear a costume made with red-to-orange color.

“It’s an old feminine dance that’s very sexy and casual, so I gave the dresses a rose-to-red-orange gradient, with flower textured decoration and irregular fabric folds,” Li adds.

Family matters

Li has spend more than 20 years designing costumes, most of which are for classical Chinese female characters — including Yang Guifei, one of the four beauties in ancient China; Bai Suzhen, a figure in Chinese mythology; and Wan Rong, the last empress of China.

For Li though, the most important Chinese woman is his mother, who first encouraged his love for the stage.

“My mom has an inherent love for beauty. She’s dedicated to braiding her hair in different styles. When I was three, she always asked me whether she looked beautiful,” Li recalls.

In his answers, he says, he would always include a complement about her outfit. “She always praised me and recognized my taste. I felt encouraged and became more interested in dress and styling. After she took me to watch Sichuan opera, I started trying to apply opera makeup on my sister’s face and dreamt of the stage,” Li says.

Li later left Sichuan to study stage art at the Shanghai Theater Academy.

“During my early years in Shanghai, I studied and enjoyed painting — especially painting the beauties. I was into Western women with chiseled feature. Regretfully, China at that time was not as opened as today. The only models I could find with Western faces were girls from Xinjiang. In some ways, this show here in Xinjiang is a dream come true,” the master costume-maker says.

In 1988, he went to Japan to study fashion, becoming one of the first oversea Chinese students in the country after the founding of the People’s Republic of China.

Li identifies Japanese culture as another influence, particularly its attention to detail. Issey Miyake, the godfather of Japanese fashion, is one of his idols. The Japanese passion for art, he says, has also forced him to live each day of his creative life to the absolute fullest.