CHAPEL HILL - Lots of tiny red and green words are circled on a drawing board and connected by arrows. It looks like the diagram of a basketball play or a frenetic road map to faraway treasures.

Both interpretations are apt, because the board in Emil Kang's office illustrates how the executive director for the arts at UNC-Chapel Hill is in nonstop pursuit of the day when culture is as big as sports on campus.

"Our board chairman says athletics and arts are the front porch to the university," Kang said, referring to the Carolina Performing Arts national advisory board. "We need more room on our front porch."

Kang is rearranging furniture as fast as he can, and the drawing board helps him do it. "That's my mind map," he said. "It shows the connections we have everywhere."

The mind map intertwines ideas spawned from Kang's global travels in search of new performers, his obligation to faculty and student artists and how it all fits into the university's academic and community initiatives.

Kang, 39, was Chancellor James Moeser's choice to be the first "arts czar" at UNC. He was hired in 2005 to marshal the university's diffuse performing arts programs into a single entity with a higher profile than they had individually. Moeser himself came to the university with a passion for the arts, having been a concert organist with undergraduate music degrees.

Soon after Kang's arrival, Moeser imagined out loud what it would be like if students camped out for seats in Memorial Hall as they do for basketball tickets at UNC-CH and Duke. If they did, he said only half-jokingly, it could be called "Kangville" -- Carolina's version of the Blue Devils' "Krzyzewski-ville."

Kang says he still isn't as recognized on campus as a basketball coach. But he excitedly shows off e-mail he has received from students who said they didn't care about music, dance or theater until they met some of the artists who have performed on campus.

"This is why I do what I do," he said. "People think the arts can't change lives. It's a job I take very seriously."

Hot tickets

Kang is reaching somebody because early in his third season, the programs at Memorial Hall are among the hottest tickets in the Triangle; 11 concerts are likely to be sold out.

"Sellouts this year have been insane," Kang said. "We didn't expect it."

But Kang said sellouts aren't the measure that matters most. What it's really all about, he says, is exposing audiences to new performances.

"Our larger goal is to convince our community it's not all about familiarity," he said. "That's what separates us from commercial venues."

Occasionally, the worlds of commerce and the arts meet, and esoteric performances can fill the 1,400-seat hall. That happened twice in October, and it was a surprise.

"Classical Cambodian dance brought in 90 percent of capacity," he said. "How did we do that? French contemporary circus was a sellout. We expected [cellist] Yo-Yo Ma and [violinist] Joshua Bell to sell out. But this?"

Aaron Greenwald, who is Kang's interim counterpart at Duke University, says Carolina Performing Arts has done a good job marketing itself and has spent a lot of money on blockbuster acts. Greenwald compliments Kang's willingness to program noncommercial acts, although he says he thinks Duke's programs have a more "thematically driven, uncompromised" approach.

"I admire his forward-thinking stuff and his ability to raise money," he said. "They've undertaken some incredibly ambitious series."

No topic taboo

Kang is also proud of the campus' current yearlong artistic exploration of the death penalty, financed by a competitive national grant. He hopes to tackle a new topic in that way every year.

"Some people think the arts should just do pretty things and leave the important topics to others," Kang said. "Of course, these are the people we don't have time for."

Finding obscure but talented performers doesn't come from flipping through Web pages looking for acts to book. Kang says his role is more akin to that of a curator, responsible for bringing context to performances through research and such public events as question-and-answer sessions from the stage.

That's why he shows up all over the place: the local Rotary Club, the Edinburgh International Festival in Scotland, China, New Zealand. He has just returned from a week in Russia with Tom Kearns -- the new chairman of the national advisory board, who was also the starting point guard on the Tar Heel's 1957 national championship basketball team.

Kearns, a retired partner in a New York investment company who now lives in Connecticut, says it was a struggle to keep up with his traveling companion, who seemed to get by on only a few hours' sleep each night.

"He's extraordinarily energetic," Kearns says, "and he's great company."

More important, Kearns says, Kang's mission to shake hands around the world will pay off.

"He will continue to open a lot of doors that hadn't been opened before," he says. "I'm really excited about it. A lot of great things are going to happen in Chapel Hill and for the state of North Carolina."

Planting relationships

Kang and Kearns met with the largest arts organizations in Russia and took in a full schedule of performances, including the Bolshoi Ballet. Kang said they went to establish relationships that might pay off later.

"If we don't do that, why would they want to come here?" Kang said. "They can get the money elsewhere. It's not about the fee. If we can get them to buy into our vision, we think those efforts will pay dividends in the years to come."

When Kang wasn't meeting people, taking in performances or getting his three hours of sleep a night, he was blogging. As he did on his trip to China, he posted travel-journal entries and photographs. He blogged about one day in a museum in St. Petersburg where he unintentionally took a flash photograph of a masterpiece painting.

An older woman screamed at him in perfectly good English: "Hey you! Have you never been in a museum before? What are you doing?"

Kang has spent plenty of time in the refined world in which he operates. He studied violin from age 7 to 22 and worked in an art gallery in New York City. At 31, he took over the Detroit Symphony, becoming the youngest and first Asian-American chief executive of a major orchestra.

In Detroit, he won praise for his programming and led a fundraising drive that restored a venerable concert hall. But four years later, he resigned in exhaustion after the symphony's million-dollar deficits wore him down. He went home to his wife, Lisa, and newborn daughter, Emma.

Moeser recognized Kang's fundraising ability and determined that the Detroit orchestra's financial problems weren't his fault. Kang has been busy raising money for an arts endowment and reports that more than $13 million in cash, pledges and estate gifts has been secured.

The goal, he said, is building UNC-CH's performing arts reputation so it can draw ever more impressive performers, produce more of its own shows and convince the Triangle that the campus has a vibrant scene. All of that is growing amid a 20-year construction and renovation plan under way to create an "arts common" on campus.

Back in his office, a white hard hat sits within reach, next to pictures of his family and of famous performers.

"We'll never know when we're done," Kang said of the construction, and the same could be said of his own work.