Wen Hui

Chinese choreographer and dancer Wen Hui (she/her) is one of the pioneers of Chinese contemporary dance. She also makes documentary films and installations. For the past thirty years, Wen Hui has been using dance theater as a means of social intervention. Since 2008, she has been researching the body as a form of personal social documentation and experimenting with how bodily memory can catalyze the collision between history and reality.

A graduate of the Beijing Dance Academy in 1989 with a degree in choreography, Wen Hui studied modern dance in New York in 1994. She also received a 1997-1998 fellowship from the Asian Cultural Council to continue her studies in New York.  From 1999-2000, she worked with Ralph Lemon’s Dance project, Geography Trilogy II – Trees, and toured the U.S. with the company including the BAM Next Wave Festival in New York in 2000. 

In 1994, Wen Hui co-founded the first independent dance theater group in China, the Living Dance Studio, in Beijing. In 2005, Wen Hui and Wu Wenguang established the Caochangdi Workstation and co-curated The Crossing International Dance Festival in Beijing. The same year, they initiated The European Artists Exchange Project and Young Choreographers Project. In 2015, Wen Hui curated the ReActor Project at Shanghai Museum of Contemporary Art (Power Station of Shanghai).

Wen Hui’s work and that of the Living Dance Studio have been invited to perform at the most provocative international stages and festivals, including her Report on Body at the Walker Art Center in 2003. Her two films, Dance with Third Grandmother and Dance with Farm Workers, were shown in the Chinese Pavilion at the 2015 Venice Biennale. Dance Only Exists When It Is Performed is a set of two solo exhibitions featuring Yvonne Rainer and Wen Hui at the Beijing Inside-Out Art Museum in 2019. Her exhibition, The Arts of Memory, was shown at the Guangzhou Image Triennial in 2021. Wen Hui’s solo work, I am 60, was presented at Festival d’Automne in Paris and at the 2021 Ruhrtriennale in Germany. Her newest work, New Report on Giving Birth (2023), was also presented at the Festival d’Automne, Rhine-Main Dance Festival at Künstlerhaus Mousonturm in Frankfurt, HAU Hebbel am Ufer in Berlin, HELLERAU European Art Center in Dresden, and at PACT Zollverein in Essen.

In 2004, her Report on Body won the ZKB Patronage Prize by Zürcher Theater Spektakel.

In 2021, Wen Hui received the Order of Merit of the Federal Republic of Germany, known as the Goethe Medal.