"I had this bitter and serious look since I was a child," Wang told the media recently. "Such facial expressions even I didn't like. But then I realized it reveals my effort. … When you play you have to open your heart and remove all the masks, so that you concentrate on the deepest and strongest emotion from the bottom of your heart. You can't possibly have a smile on your face at times like this."

In 1981, Wang played with the Shanghai Symphony Orchestra for the first time. It was a concert for Children's Day, and he was picked by the conductor Huang Yijun to play a concerto by Camille Saint-Saens. "Those grandpas with the orchestra asked how old I was and I said 12.They said 'no way, you must have a girlfriend. You have the feelings of a grown-up, and a grown-up who had suffered'."

In 1985, he went to the US where he studied with the renowned cellist Aldo Parisot at Yale University for eight years. In 1992, the Shanghai Symphony Orchestra went on a tour to Europe and Wang joined the company as a soloist. The next year, he completed his studies and came back to Shanghai to play with the orchestra again.

Now that he is back home, Wang hopes to play more concerts, and take more cello music to cities that he has never been to before.

"There are all these new concert halls, and people are picking up new aesthetic interests for chamber music. We will be able to bring more pieces that were previously never heard there," he says.