China's 'big 3' keep their individuality

"They have rules about what classical musicians should be wearing, which I think is stupid," The New York Times quoted Wang as saying.

"I wanted to do the shock value. I can wear long and black too. I like being versatile," she told the newspaper.

Wang never reads reviews about her performance. She wrote on Twitter that "Music criticism should be to musicians what ornithology is to birds".

The only daughter of a dancer and a percussionist, she was born in Beijing in 1987. She started to learn the piano at age 6, and she studied at the affiliated primary and middle school of the Central Conservatory of Music in Beijing. At 12, she went alone to study at the Mount Royal College in Calgary in the Morningside Music summer program, an artistic and cultural exchange program between Canada and China, and later began studying at the conservatory there.

In 2002, she moved to the United States to study at the Curtis Institute of Music in Philadelphia with Gary Graffman, who was also Lang Lang's mentor at Curtis.

Graffman said that during Wang's audition, he was impressed by the intelligence and good taste in her interpretations of musical works.

Since they had same teacher at Curtis, Wang is often asked about Lang but she always says that they are very different artists with very different personalities.

Lang, 32, seems to have appeared at every gala occasion in recent years: the 2014 World Cup concert in Rio, the 56th Grammy Awards, the Opening Ceremony of the 2008 Beijing Olympics and the Liszt 200th birthday concert that was broadcast live in more than 300 movie theaters in the United States and 200 cinemas across Europe; the list goes on and on.