WEN Hui Portrait

WEN Hui is a pioneer of contemporary dance in China, a documentary filmmaker and an installation artist. She started her professional four-year dance training at Yunnan Art School when she was thirteen years old. After working as a dancer and dance teacher for many years, she studied choreography at Beijing Dance Academy, 1985, and graduated in 1989. She went to New York, to study modern dance in 1994 and later won a scholarship from the Asian Cultural Council to study modern dance and drama creation, again in New York, from 1997 to 1998.
In 1994, she founded Living Dance Studio with WU Wenguang in Beijing and worked as choreographer for all of their performance pieces. For over twenty years, she has been insisting that art should intervene with society by means of theatre. From 2008, she began to study the human body as an archive for social records and explored ways in which to connect a person’s body-memories to history and the present.
In 2005, she founded independent art space Caochangdi Workstation, in Beijing, with WU Wenguang.

Choreographic works:
100 Verbs (1994), Living Together / Toilet (1995), Breathe with the Earth (1996), Dining with 1997 (1996), Skirt /
Video (1997), Report on Giving Birth (1999), Dance with Farm Workers (2001), Report on Body (2002), Time /
Space (2004), Report on 37º8 (2005), Outlands (2006), Skirt (2007), Memory (2008), Treatment (2009), Memory
on the Road (2011), Listening to Third Grandmother’s Stories (2012), Hungry Daughters (2013)
Documentary works:
Listening to Third Grandmother’s Stories (2011)
Dance with Third Grandmother (2015)
Installation works:
Memory Mountain (2013)
Report on Body (2002) won the ZKB Award at Zürcher Theatre Spektakl in 2004.