Shen Wei On “STILL / MOVING” and Finding Harmony Across Disciplines

<img decoding="async" class="lazyload size-full-width wp-image-1596986" src="data:image/gif;base64,R0lGODlhAQABAAAAACH5BAEKAAEALAAAAAABAAEAAAICTAEAOw==" data-src="https://observer.com/wp-content/uploads/sites/2/2025/11/ShenWeiDanceArts_byFilipWolak_0628_5441.jpg?quality=80&w=970" alt="A gallery installation view showing two visitors standing in front of a large white canvas with gold and gray brushwork, emphasizing the scale and texture of Shen Wei’s recent paintings.” width=”970″ height=”647″ data-caption=’Shen Wei, <em>Untitled Number 31</em>, on view at at the Katonah Museum of Art. <span class=”lazyload media-credit”>Photo: Filip Wolak, ourtesy of the Katonah Museum of Art</span>’>

Just north of New York City, the Katonah Museum of Art (KMA) and the Pocantico Center of the Rockefeller Brothers Fund have joined forces for the first time to present “Shen Wei: STILL / MOVING.” The dual-venue exhibition, on view through mid-April, spans almost three decades of visual art, dance and film created by the world-renowned Chinese American MacArthur “Genius Grant” Fellow Shen Wei.

Shen Wei was born in Hunan, China, in 1968. From a young age, he trained in Chinese opera, traditional painting and calligraphy. He performed with the Hunan State Xian Opera Company before becoming a founding member of the Guangdong Modern Dance Company, one of the first of its kind in China. He moved to New York City in 1995 and founded Shen Wei Dance Arts in 2000. Since then, his award-winning company has performed in over 30 countries and his paintings and dance installations have been shown at major institutions like the Metropolitan Museum of Art, the Asia Society Hong Kong Center, the Isabella Stewart Gardner Museum and the Shanghai Power Station of Art.

Shen Wei has always been more than one thing, so it is fitting that his body of work should span more than one art form and require more than one venue to present it. The exhibition at the KMA explores the space where his mediums meet—how movement has influenced his visual art and how visual art has influenced his movement—while the Pocantico Center exhibition focuses on his more recent abstract landscape paintings. Observer spoke at length with Shen Wei about his evolution as an artist and dancer, his lifelong love of solitude and his thoughts on the new exhibition. What follows is an excerpt of our conversation, edited for length and clarity.

You have said that by age six, you were already interested in dance and painting. What drew you to both of those artistic practices at that young age?

I always ask myself that question. I think it has to do with my personality. I was born in the year of the monkey. I like moving around and expressing myself through movement. But another part of my personality is that I’m so quiet. I’m kind of a shy person. When I’m not doing performing arts, I’m totally different. I don’t really like to be around lots of people. I don’t celebrate birthdays. I don’t like that kind of big attention. I like to be quiet and I also like to be alone.

I remember once when I was little, six or seven years old, I was drawing balloons. I used different calligraphy pens to color in each balloon with lines and I made the balloons more colorful than they really were, their colors better than they were in real life. And I remember that making something even prettier than what it really was made me feel so happy. I’d somehow achieved something and I had done it alone.

I still like to be alone. Holding a book, going to the park, sitting down, making drawings, writing. You can have this kind of dialogue with yourself and digest the world. It gives me time to question myself, to find the real things, to be more sensitive to what’s going on. You can be more aware when you’re alone than when you’re with a bunch of people.

Your father was involved with the Chinese opera?

Yes, my father retired as an opera director. He was also a writer and sometimes he made the designs for his productions. A lot of things I do are similar to what my father did, but he was working in the traditional art forms and I’m doing it in a more contemporary way. Maybe I was inspired, or it’s in the DNA, I don’t know. My two brothers are also painters and my mother was a producer.

How did you discover modern dance and Western forms of painting?

When I was in the Chinese opera school, we had a book about art and ideas. One chapter talked about Western art. Of course, they had some old classical art. But they also introduced Duchamp’s Nude Descending a Staircase. We didn’t understand that one but thought it was interesting. Is it just one person or many people? Are they really nude? That was when I was like ten or twelve.

In the 1980s, China kind of opened the door to the West and all the Western paintings, or the books about them, came to China. Around 1984, I bought a book of Western paintings and it included Da Vinci and Michelangelo. I was shocked by how beautiful the drawings were. They were so different from the ones I’d seen. I learned the Chinese way, Gongbi. But when I saw the Western paintings, they were more realistic. They had dimension, perspective. You could see the real person within the paint, like the whole human being. I started to copy it, to teach myself. And then after I graduated in 1984, a friend started to teach me how to do oil paintings with Western techniques.

I didn’t see modern dance until 1986 or 1987 when I went to Beijing to study painting. There was a company—I think it was a ballet company doing modern work—and it was the first time I saw a girl dancing without shoes and wearing something more like pajamas. And oh, she danced beautifully! I never thought people could wear those kinds of clothes on stage without shoes. It’s the opposite of Chinese opera. We wear so much! So many costumes. After seeing that performance, I understood that there could be modern dance, just like modern paintings.

In 1988, I went to a dance competition because I needed the money to study painting. I wasn’t really a professional dancer, but I was good with movement. So, I made my own dance piece and I wore normal clothes. I used my Chinese opera technique but made it contemporary. Everybody was performing traditional repertoire and then I played Beethoven’s Symphony No. 5 and danced like crazy and they were shocked. In the end, I got the special first prize. It gave me confidence. The judges all loved me and I realized I had another possibility—to be a dancer. But I still wanted to make paintings too.

What made you want to come to New York?

After studying modern dance for five years and also being the first generation to participate in the first modern dance company in China called Guangdong Modern Dance Company, I was doing really well—I was a dancer but also the choreographer, building all the works for the company—but I thought, “I’m not enough. I have to learn more.” It’s like a hunger. I want to be challenged. That’s kind of my personality. I like to learn more things. I like to learn things I don’t understand. I want to be better. Always.

I thought, “Let’s go to the tough place, the best place. New York City. They have all the dance and art.” So I applied for a scholarship to study [with the Nikolais/Louis Dance Lab] there and somehow, I got it.

When did you start combining your two art forms?

While I was dancing with Guangdong, I was painting the dancers in the company all the time. They were my models. But when I got to New York, it was really tough. I had no money or friends and didn’t speak English. So, I had more time to paint. I also made a film at that time about how lonely I was. In 1998, I did an exhibition of my paintings [at Dance Theater Workshop] because I’d made so many during that time. And I was dancing. But I hadn’t yet figured out how those things would merge.

In 2003, I made a set for my company’s Rite of Spring that was a big painted canvas that the dancers performed on. When it premiered at the Lincoln Center Festival, I also showed a series of my paintings that were studies for Rite of Spring. That was the first time that my visual art and performance were publicly shown together.

And then in 2004, I created Connect Transfer, where I actually used my body as a brush on the big canvas. And around that time, I also used my body to make paintings, in the Slide-turn series.

Some paintings from both those series—Study for Rite of Spring and Slide-turn—are on view at the KMA. I love this idea of using your body as a paintbrush. Tell me more!

Yes. You don’t stop when you’re dancing. You just keep going like a paintbrush on the floor. Really silky, flowing movement. It’s a part of Natural Body Development, a technique I created for my dancers. It’s like calligraphy, how the hand keeps going. You use the internal energy to move continuously. This was not something I’d learned from my past. I wanted to make something that was better, more interesting. Different. It reminds me of the balloons—I wanted to make better balloons than the ones that I saw.

The technique has really benefited my dancers and affected my painting, too. The Slide-turn series, definitely, but also the series Suspension in Blue [on view at the Pocantico Center]. The technique trains the dancers to suspend. You extend your energy out and float in the air as long as you can before gravity takes over. That moment, right before you’re falling, I call the “suspension moment.” You use that moment to dance, which means you’re never really in your center, but you’re never completely falling off. In the Suspension in Blue series, there is a feeling of floating in the air, falling, but not hitting the ground yet. It’s the same kind of idea, whether in dance or painting.

In what other ways has your background in dance affected your paintings?

When I was making the Slide-turn paintings with my feet, I wasn’t just thinking about sliding and turning, but also how slow, how fast and how much weight I should put on it. Most people think about what paintings look like—what the shapes look like—but I’m interested in what the speed looks like, what the time looks like, how the energy looks. The movement. My paintings always involve movement, even the landscape paintings.

I am also interested in the series at the KMA where you list the songs you had been listening to while creating the paintings and a QR code so we can listen too. The musicians range from Tom Waits to Li Xiangting to Mozart.

It’s music I personally love to listen to. And I wanted to discover what is the movement of the music? And what does the movement of the music look like? They’re abstract, visual studies of the feelings and textures of the music.

At the Pocantico Center, where the more recent works are, I noticed that there are oil, acrylic and watercolor paintings. Do you have a favorite medium to work with?

I started with oil, then acrylic, because it felt more controllable. What you see there spans about ten years of work. I started using watercolor during the pandemic. I used it when I was little, doing Chinese painting, but watercolor is the hardest to control and usually I don’t like to use it. But I’d been doing so much acrylic and oil and I needed to challenge myself a little bit. It took half a year to figure out how to paint in watercolor again in a new way. And then I started using it on canvas, which is even more difficult because it doesn’t absorb anything and can be easily damaged. You have to be more careful.

Watercolor has a problem. It looks so light, no weight. For a few years, I’ve been trying to figure out how to make watercolor have weight like oils. I really want to achieve with watercolor what oil painting can do with its depth and heaviness. I’m still working on it.

What are you interested in now, in terms of your new work?

In both my new paintings and dance work, I want to give people more hope. More light. I want to bring back a sense of balance for the audience and some joy. People think contemporary art should challenge society, but I’ve done that for so many years. I still want people to think about life, but I want them to embrace it too. The new dance is lighter, less dry. And the paintings are, too. More colorful. I want people to feel warm, but it’s not trying to be cheesy entertainment. I have to be deep and thoughtful to embrace the goodness of life, in both painting and dance.

And now I’m creating everything together. When I’m making the paintings, I’m thinking about the dance. And when I’m making the dance, I’m thinking about the paintings.

When did that start happening, that the dancing and the painting were in constant dialogue?

In the last few years. The elements used to be connected, but not entirely. Now, when I create, they slowly inspire each other. I have to make a painting to help me understand the dance movement I’m working on, for instance. Everything is conceptually related.

How was it seeing your work presented in this way, as a dual-venue exhibition? What were your favorite parts?

I’m so happy to see some of the work I haven’t seen for a while. It’s like seeing your babies again. People don’t realize how strange that is for me. I’ve spent so much time alone with each painting. One of the works took five years! I’ve never been with any person as long as with my paintings. So when they’re here, 25 years of paintings, it’s like showing my journals to people. My soul, my feelings, my senses. It’s kind of vulnerable for me. When I see each painting, I’m immediately back in the memories of that time. But the watercolors make me happy because they’re my newest achievement. They’re fresh, like a new baby.

This is my first time having my work separated into different spaces and periods. The Katonah exhibit is more abstract, about music and movement and choreographic development. And at the Pocantico Center, it’s more spiritual, colorful, in the landscape direction. So they’re both, curatorially, so clear. The audience will see a totally different environment, and have a totally different experience in each. I hope they see both.

“Shen Wei: STILL/MOVING” is on view at The Pocantico Center through April 18, 2026, and at the Katonah Museum of Art through April 19, 2026.

More Arts interviews

• Gallery ATARAH Founder Atarah Atkinson On Building a New Exhibition Space With Old-School Ideals

• How Artist Eamon Ore-Giron Is Keeping Ancient Deities Alive

• No Deadlines, No Demands: Inside Delfina Foundation, London’s Most International Residency

• Five Decades On, Hal Bromm Reflects On His Gallery’s History and His Own Legacy

• Roshini Vadehra Charts India’s Growing Role in the Global Art Market