This week we’re sharing tributes to all of the 2024 Dance Magazine Award honorees. For tickets to the awards ceremony on December 2, visit store.dancemedia.com.
Shen Wei blends art forms like watercolors. He is accomplished in not just multiple forms of dance but also painting, set design, costuming, film, architecture, calligraphy, and poetry—all of which he integrates into his artistic practice. “Making art gives meaning and value to my life and brings magic to the world,” he says.
Born in Hunan province in 1968 to Chinese opera professionals, Shen Wei was trained from early childhood in the traditional arts of Chinese opera, ink painting, and calligraphy. He began modern dance training at the American Dance Festival’s program at the Guangdong Dance Academy in China, and in 1991, he became a founding member of Guangdong Modern Dance Company, the first professional modern dance company in China. In 1995, Shen Wei was awarded a fellowship to study at the Nikolais/Louis Dance Lab and moved to New York City. In July 2000, he founded his company, Shen Wei Dance Arts.
Spending days in the studio dancing and choreographing while also carving out time for painting, Shen Wei pushed the envelope of physicality in visual art, sometimes eschewing the paintbrush and using parts of his body to apply the paint. He extended this method into several choreographic works, in which paint-slathered dancers fill a floor canvas through their dancing.
Shen Wei’s dance technique, which he calls “Natural Body Development,” reflects his multicultural, multidimensional understanding of movement, seeking to align the human body’s internal energies with external forces. His choreography has a similarly integrated vision. Painterly set and costume designs and impressionistic films often merge with the dancing to create a unified whole—as in his sweeping choreography for the opening ceremonies of the 2008 Beijing Olympics.
Shen Wei attributes his ability to create total-art experiences to his training as a Chinese opera performer. “We had to dance, sing, act—everything related to the visual arts,” he recounted in a 2016 interview at the Asia Society in New York City. “I wasn’t taught the arts separately, so I don’t separate them in my work.”
Shen Wei has received high-profile commissions and awards and has exhibited his art across the globe. Today, his influence is as boundaryless as his art
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