While other young adults make their way through high school and college, Brian Nieh, Regina Dong, and Serena Liang spend 14 hours a day training, studying, and dancing with the Divine Performing Arts, a New York based troupe of classical dancers and musicians.

Many of the 100+ performers that make up Divine Performing Arts are young Chinese artists who have lived most, if not all, of their lives outside of China. But despite their western upbringings, they have come to be seen as the torchbearers of traditional Chinese culture.

The genuine traditional arts of China have nearly perished under the last six decades of communist rule, and these performers see it as their mission, having grown up in a free society, to bring the true spirit of their people back to life.

During the Cultural Revolution of the 1960s and 1970s, in particular, China’s 5,000-year-old culture was decimated. Buddhist and Daoist monasteries were destroyed, and traditional arts and music were shunned as relics of the feudal era. Even Confucianism, which had long been the moral philosophy at the heart of Chinese culture, was attacked and replaced with the glorification of violence.

“I didn’t understand Chinese culture before, but if you think about, who does? It is hard for anyone, even the people in China, to know anymore. So we are digging it up and letting the world get to know it,” says 19-year-old Brian Nieh.

“Having grown up in America, being born here, my dad would try to teach me about Chinese culture and read me classical stories,” says Nieh. “But once I joined Divine Performing Arts I realized I didn’t know anything. In preparing for the different dances we learn about Chinese culture, and then the audience learns through us.”

At first glance, it seems strange that American-born teenagers could even properly perform traditional Chinese dances, much less be at the forefront of a movement to revitalize a profound, ancient culture. They grew up on MTV and skateboarding, not Confucianism and ballet, but they somehow beautifully balance this dialectic life of ancient Buddhist principles and texting their friends on their cell phones.

Rediscovering the essence of traditional Chinese arts requires more than just learning the old moves and designing classic costumes, according to Nieh. “You have live a more traditional life, spiritually and morally. It has to come from within.”

“People from communist china have the best techniques and are the most flexible, but their dances are deviated. It’s not about who has the best abilities. We are trying to communicate with the audience. That’s the energy of our group together. The audience is looking at the whole group so we just try to contribute to the group,” states Nieh’s fellow dancer Serena Liang.

Their altruistic approach to life and dance comes from what is known in Chinese culture as “Xiu Lian,” or self-cultivation, an ancient concept describing the process of refining one’s character through Buddhism or Taoism. The performers at Divine Performing Arts say the only way to convey beauty and purity in their performances is to develop it from within themselves by stressing honesty, compassion, and leading virtuous lives.

“Everything comes from cultivation,” says Regina Dong about how she is able to convincingly depict heavenly maidens and Bodhisattvas on stage. “We cultivate to reach their level, learn about them, look at paintings and statues, and try to be in the same state as how we imagine them to be.

“We have to dance with a pure heart in order to accurately portray a Buddha or Bodhisattva,” she says.

Serena says she quietly went into the audience once to watch a part of the show that didn’t require her to be on stage. “The synchronization of the dancers with each other, with their heart and body, they cooperate, you can see their hearts are not for themselves. It was a very pure moment, just watching my friends performing so perfectly.”