Famed contemporary Chinese artist Zhang Huan is no stranger to performance art, but this fall he takes his involvement with the world of performance to a new level. Commissioned by the London-based KT Wong Foundation in association with Belgian opera house Théâtre Royal de la Monnaie, Zhang will design and direct a new production of Handel's Semele. The production coincides with the 250th anniversary of Handel's death.

Zhang's presentation of the myth of Semele, a classic Greek tale about the complicated relationship between the gods and humans, and jealousy among the gods, promises to be a unique blending of Eastern and Western cultures, of contemporary art and classical music. (Christophe Rousset, a leading Baroque music specialist in Europe, will conduct.) For his backdrop, Zhang will use an original Ming dynasty ancestral temple that he discovered in Quzhou.

"I am very excited to have the luck and opportunity to be able to take an ancestral family temple with over 450 years of history and use it on the stage of a 300-year-old European opera house," the artist writes in the opera's program notes. "The fact that the roots of pain introduced thousands of years ago in a Western opera reappear in the East in the fate of a single peasant family in the countryside of China can make us continually ponder the redemptive qualities of humanity."