Last April, actress Huang Xiangli opened her first photography exhibition at Beijing Fengchao Theatre entitled Heide Baide (lit. the black and the white).

On view were a series of large-scale colored photos she took of her friends, directly expanded from negatives hand-painted with florescent colors of scarlet, green, yellow, blue.

Since her involvement in Chinese director Meng Jinghui's play Rhinoceros in Love in 2008, young actress Huang Xiangli has become an active figure in today's Chinese theater scene. Photo: Courtesy of Meng Jinghui Theatre Studio

Just eight months later in December, she held her first concert, The Secret of My Left Hand, with a band made up of three notable musicians from different Chinese bands.

Most recently, Huang was in Shanghai playing five characters in one-woman show Hello, Sorrow! adapted from French writer Françoise Sagan's Bonjour Tristesse.

The 30-year-old effortlessly delivered the lead role of 17-year-old Cécile, while also managing to switch between characters of different sexes and generations with ease throughout the show.

"I never imagined that I would be so fortunate as to live such a pleasant life," Huang told the Global Times.

"It's been way better than I could have expected."

Finding the theater

Born in a small city in Hunan Province, Huang was an introverted girl who learned classical Chinese dance before she was persuaded by her mother to apply for The Central Academy of Drama (CAD) in 2003. It was here that she watched a play for the first time.

"Only after I entered the college did I start to love the art of drama," Huang said.

"Before then, I couldn't appreciate acting because of my limited and biased understanding that acting is about pretending and being untrue to oneself."

But after she watched a 2-hour performance of Little Women presented by a group of senior students, she became "totally shocked" by the art of acting.

"I made up my mind that I should learn and become as energetic and charming as those student actors."

She threw herself into rehearsals and listened attentively to her tutors, who taught her that the first step to becoming a good actor is to become a good person.

"The studying at CAD really laid a solid groundwork for my career. Then, after I entered the Meng Jinghui Theatre Studio, I improved a lot more," said Huang, who enrolled in the pioneering experimental theater studio in 2008 for the play Rhinoceros in Love.

Open and free

Director Meng Jinghui has influenced Huang in almost every aspect of her life.

She says Meng doesn't impose rigid rules or directions on actors, but instead encourages everybody to share their own ideas.

"In the beginning, I think none of us actors could communicate with our director on the same level," said Huang.

"But in recent years, he would say 'you have gradually come to know what I'm saying.' I think he makes us better and more free-minded."

Huang reads extensively, watches movies and sees art exhibitions. She also loves to go abroad to see theater productions.

"A person shouldn't be like a frog living forever at the bottom of a well. You should go out, see and learn, you should know what is the best and what is the latest in the drama scene, so that you can have a further aim and you won't only limit your vision."

With Rhinoceros in Love, Huang has toured around China and some foreign countries with more than 1,000 performances. She took different roles on different tours.

In 2013, Meng created a one-woman show Letter from an Unknown Woman tailored to Huang. So far, the play has been performed around China 280 times.

When asked how she maintains the focus to deliver a good performance for shows she has done hundreds of times, Huang answered that the secret lies in her abiding love of the stage and how she absorbs energy from her everyday life.

"For instance, today the weather is good, so I sunbathed, had coffee and called my mom. Or you go to see a movie, or you just get up and quietly listen to some music to get in a good mood. But maybe one night I will have a bad dream, then the next day my state of mind will be slightly different. But no matter what you come across, you'd better get some fresh energy from it, and bring the fresh energy every day to the play."

It was in Letter from an Unknown Woman that Huang first tried to write songs. She only started learning to play guitar in 2011 to prepare for the role of Mingming in Rhinoceros in Love.

Singing onward

The Letter from an Unknown Woman used three of her compositions, and Hello, Sorrow! had one with French lyrics taken from a poem.

She also wrote a piano solo for the new play, but this was not included.

It was initially Meng's idea for Huang to write the songs, even though at the time Huang only knew a few simple chords.

"I realized that one's potential is ready to be explored, as long as you want to do it," said Huang, who describes taking up songwriting as opening a new door in her life.

Perhaps music also runs in the family - her father is a trumpeter who once had a band, and her mother loves singing and dancing.

But it is the stage that remains Huang's leading passion, and she seems well on the way to fulfill her self-stated objective of becoming a "damn good" actress.