This article is part of a Women and Leadership special report highlighting women who have forged new paths.
For decades, the dancer, choreographer and filmmaker Wen Hui has been one of China’s most doggedly independent artists. Born in 1960 in the southwestern province of Yunnan, just before the Cultural Revolution, she first encountered dance as a girl imitating scenes from revolutionary operas and performing so-called loyalty dances in the streets to spread Mao Zedong Thought.
She went on to study at the top Beijing Dance Academy, famous for its state-run rigor, but amid the heady, culturally open years during the country’s shift toward a market economy, her path took a different turn.
She would spend the rest of her career outside the state system, seeking to dismantle her strict training and return to her body’s own intelligence. In pieces that merge performance, video, text and oral history, Wen explores the everyday movements of ordinary life — how people walk, work, give birth and remember. She is a researcher of what she calls body memory: the way intergenerational trauma and lived experiences remain in our flesh and move through us, she says, like blood or sound.
In 1994, Ms. Wen founded Living Dance Studio, China’s first independent dance theater group, with the filmmaker Wu Wenguang, her partner at the time. From 2004 to 2014, it was based at Caochangdi Workstation, their arts space on Beijing’s outskirts where she ran an annual festival and nurtured a generation of young choreographers by offering rehearsal and performance space, workshops and international exchanges.
Ms. Wen, 65, now primarily resides in Frankfurt. From a Brooklyn hotel room, her base while performing her latest work, “What Is War,” at the Brooklyn Academy of Music, she discussed her beginnings, the evolution of Chinese contemporary dance and how she came to recognize herself as a feminist artist. This interview was translated in parts from Chinese, has been edited and condensed.
You have often said that your first stint overseas, to New York in 1994, changed everything. What did you discover there?
Before I came to New York, my perspective was that a performance meant there must be a stage, lighting. But in New York, I discovered you can do anything — dance on the train, in the street, anywhere. You don’t need lights. Anything goes! It was a shock to my way of thinking. This “no problem” way of creating was a very big shift for me.
We didn’t have independent dance companies then, only official groups. You could only do what the ensemble told you to do, no individual thinking. In the ’80s and ’90s, it was all about grand narratives, not individual voices.
You came back to China and founded Living Dance Studio. What did you want it to stand for?
The important idea for us was, “100 percent life, 0 percent art.” Art not for art’s sake, but as an expression of your perspective of reality. What mattered was expressing what was happening right here, right now.
What was the starting point for your first independent piece, “100 Verbs” (1994), which kicked off the studio?
It’s one day in a woman’s daily life, expressed in 100 verbs. Onstage, I clean the floor, wash clothes, rewash them. I take a shower. I hang all the clothes across the stage. I pair this with movement.
In the ’80s and ’90s, Chinese women carried a heavy weight of social and family responsibilities, but we didn’t know how to express it. We needed an outlet. In China at that time, there were no independent dancers. So I had to invite 10 friends to perform it — whoever was willing. People thought, “Oh my God, what are you doing? This isn’t dance.” I didn’t know. I didn’t care. I just kept doing it. I felt we needed difference — different people doing different things.
Your next major work, “Report on Giving Birth” (1999), also focused on women’s experiences. What inspired that project?
I was interested in how women were living. I began by interviewing my friends, then women of different generations — taxi drivers, factory workers. In the ’60s, ’70s and even the ’80s, we had all lived within a kind of communal language. But when we began to talk about pregnancy or birth, I found that each woman began to speak in a very real, very individual way. Their language transformed from collective to personal. I thought perhaps birth is an outlet for women’s expression, and so decided to make this work about it after five years of interviews.
Has your creative process changed as you have gotten older?
When I was young, I felt more fear. You don’t know if what you’re doing is right or not; you work from intuition. To be honest, when I made “100 Verbs,” it was basically all by intuition; I wasn’t so clear on what I was doing. Critics told me afterward, “Oh, that’s a feminist work.” I didn’t think in those terms. I was just directly speaking through my body. In 1995 in Beijing, there was the U.N. women’s conference. That was actually the first time I heard that there was this word called feminism.
Now, I’m more relaxed, more clear on what I want to do. I can sense, this must be spoken about.
What challenges do young Chinese choreographers face today?
Inside China, there are many opportunities, especially in Shanghai, but many are more about fashion, money. If you want to do really serious work, it’s very hard. Some grants give money, support but say, “You cannot do this, you cannot do that.” Of course young artists need to work and survive. Then how will individual thinking stand? That’s the hardest question.
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