KATONAH, NY.- Shen Wei: STILL / MOVING commemorates thirty years of Shen Wei’s visionary career as a dancer, choreographer, visual artist, and global cultural ambassador. The exhibition, an unprecedented joint presentation between the Katonah Museum of Art and The Pocantico Center of the Rockefeller Brothers Fund, illuminates the full scope of the artist’s practice, offering viewers rare access to his paintings, films, new choreographic works, and video highlights of the Shen Wei Dance Arts repertoire. The presentations at the KMA and Pocantico align through a multimedia focus on Shen Wei’s trailblazing practice that transcends cultural and geographic boundaries. Shen Wei’s visual art captures the body in motion through his dynamic brushwork that seamlessly incorporates Chinese calligraphy and allusions to post-World War II abstract painting movements like Action Painting and Gutai, among others. Traditional Chinese shan shui (mountain-water) painting offers an additional source of inspiration for his abstract and visionary landscapes.
The exhibition at the KMA emphasizes the interdisciplinarity of Shen Wei’s oeuvre: the generative influence of music on dance and the central role of choreographed movement to his paintings. At the Pocantico Center, the exhibition focuses on Shen Wei’s more recent landscape paintings, reflecting his ongoing dialogue with Chinese traditional painting and nature. Often monumental in scale, these paintings possess a cinematic quality that compels the viewer to physically engage with the work, inviting sustained contemplation. Shen Wei: STILL/MOVING includes performances by Shen Wei Dance Arts at Pocantico and the KMA’s Marilyn M. Simpson Sculpture Garden.
Shen Wei (b. 1968 in Hunan, China. Lives and works in New York, NY, U.S.A. and Paris, France) is an internationally renowned choreographer, dancer, director, and visual artist. He served as a performer with the Hunan State Xian Opera Company from 1984-1989. In 1991, the artist became a founding member of the Guangdong Modern Dance Company, the first of its kind in China. In 1995, Shen Wei moved to New York City for a fellowship from the Nikolais/Louis Dance Lab and subsequently founded Shen Wei Dance Arts in New York at the American Dance Festival in 2000. His company has toured to over 140 cities across 30 countries and received over 23 commissions from the American Dance Festival, BAM Next Wave, Dutch National Ballet, Edinburgh International Festival, Isabella Stewart Gardner Museum, Kennedy Center, Les Ballets de Monte-Carlo, Les Grands Ballets Canadiens de Montréal, Lincoln Center Festival, Metropolitan Museum of Art, Park Avenue Armory, Teatro di San Carlo, and the Shanghai International Festival among others. Shen Wei was the lead choreographer for the Opening Ceremonies of the 2008 Beijing Olympics. The Artist has been the subject of international solo museum exhibitions including at the Asia Society Hong Kong Center, Isabella Stewart Gardner Museum, Museum of Art and Design at Miami Dade College, and the Shanghai Power Station of Art. He has been the recipient of an Asian Cultural Council John D. Rockefeller 3rd Award, Dance Magazine Award, John Simon Guggenheim Fellowship, MacArthur “Genius” Award, Nijinsky Emerging Choreographer Award, Samual H. Scripps American Dance Festival Award for Lifetime Achievement in choreography, and a US Artists Fellow award. The artist’s dance technique “Natural Body Development” has been widely taught in universities and dance conservatories.
