Tucked away in the corner of a busy tech room, Ken Chieh Hsu focuses on his computer panel, tapping expertly on it with his electronic pen. On the enormous flat-screen mounted on the wall in front of him, a mythical paradise rises out of the clouds, complete with golden colonnades and marble steps. He taps once, and the clouds at the foot of the screen begin rolling across the scene. Once more, and a shining light appears, slowly descending from a corner of the sky.

You might think that Hsu is animating a scene for the next Hollywood fantasy epic, but he is actually a digital design expert for New Tang Dynasty Television, a non-profit Chinese television network based in Manhattan. Hsu is a four-year veteran of the network’s annual Chinese New Year performances, having worked on the digital backgrounds for the show every year since its inception.

These digital backgrounds are a unique part of NTDTV’s performances, and are especially eye-catching on the gigantic LED screen at Radio City, site of the 2007 Chinese New Year Spectacular. Using the uncluttered set space like a giant canvas, Hsu and his team paint scenes of ancient Chinese palaces, tall mountains and billowing seas, and even a quiet Chinese village on New Year’s Eve—hushed, expectant, and with lantern-hung streets traveling far into the horizon. “Every year,” says Hsu, “we try to make it more detailed, more realistic.”

The end result is breathtaking, but the complex creation of one of these backgrounds is amazing in itself. According to Hsu, the process starts with the artistic director, who comes up with the concept of a performance. Then the needed backgrounds are decided, and the meticulous research begins. The digital designers go through stacks of books, researching paintings from the period and gathering whatever sources they can find in order to make it as authentic and believable for the audience as possible.

But even though many backgrounds are based on traditional images and paintings, there is still plenty of room for innovation. In last year’s performance, the background for the dance “Fairies’ Flutes” was from a classical painting of a Han Dynasty-style palace. The color of the painting, however, had dimmed with age. Hsu learned through his research, as well as though his background in fine arts, that classical Chinese paintings were colorful and bright, but their pigments did not have the staying power of Western oil paints. The designers decided to restore color to the image, creating the soft, radiant feel of a watercolor. In addition, says Hsu, some of the classic paintings have a limited scope, whereas the digital artists need to create a much bigger space.

After the scene is drawn, it is time for the technological wizardry. Each year the backgrounds become more technically challenging, with more scenery changes and more animations. In “Fairies’ Flutes,” for example, the team filmed dancers in rehearsal, then used digital effects to render these three-dimensional images onto the two-dimensional background. In the show, the audience saw distant fairy maidens, flying down from the sky, only to appear on stage moments later.

The ultimate goal of these backgrounds is to use modern technology as a tool to transmit the true spirit of traditional Chinese culture. The audience should feel like the dancer is truly in the place created by the background. The audience does not just see the picture of a ship or ocean but is actually riding across the waves. The background opens the stage, expanding the space beyond its boundaries. In short, it is the creation of a world.

Such a world can only be created through an immense amount of collaboration. After all, the digital background is one part of this whole, along with the costumes, the music, and the performers. The colors of the background must harmonize with the colors of the dancers’ costumes; the animations and scene changes must be timed to shift exactly with the music; the backgrounds must often be tested during the dancers’ rehearsals, and then worked on once again. Each background may go through extensive revisions, but with each the artists reach deeper and deeper levels of meaning in the performances.

This entire process starts seven or eight months before the first show. As the work gets more intensive, Hsu and the ten or so other designers dedicate most of their time to the backgrounds. Hsu may only sleep in his own bed once every three or four days, but while he jokes about his starving-artist ways (“No money, no wife, but it’s still good”), he waxes enthusiastic about his work: “Where else could I do something so wonderful? As an artist, I can reflect the best traditional art through the best modern technology.”

Hsu hopes that the audience will be pleased with what they see at this year’s show, and is confident that it is of the highest quality. “I never knew before that traditional art was so beautiful. I want to tell people: you should really take a good look, because you’ve never seen this kind of beauty before.”