Duration：09/25-10/25

Venue：Power Station of Art Shanghai 

Price：Free

Co-presented by the China Shanghai International Arts Festival（CSIAF）and the Power Station of Art, Shanghai (PSA), the renowned American Chinese artist Shen Wei is invited to have his debut solo show in Mainland China from September 25th

to October 25th at PSA, which is meanwhile considered as an official prelude to the Exhibition Section of the 20th CSIAF. 

Curated by Caroline Hancock, a prolific independent curator from France, and François Michaud from Musée d’Art Moderne de la Ville de Paris (MaM) ，the exhibition is consisted of six areas covering the artist’s artworks in fields of painting, film, design, alongside a wealth of documentation during the past almost thirty years. It will introduce for the first time Shen Wei’s multi-disciplinary artistic practice and its fundamental connection with his experience in the field of dance from the 1990s to the present day.

In fact, Shen Wei was a painter before he became a dancer and a choreographer. The exhibition will introduce some of his early figurative paintings from the 1990s, followed by his first abstract experiments in the mid 2000s combining his interest in space, time, form and texture, music and “plastic movement”. In the 2010s, he moved towards a new kind of expression in various series of monumental paintings. Merging the experience of the human body, land- and mindscapes, as well as forms of abstraction, Shen Wei proposes visual manifestations of movement, breathing, a certain momentum or sensibility and the environment. With brighter palettes, the smaller-scaled recent works take new directions which hint towards potential representational analogies. 

In 1998, he began a sixteen-year process formalising his own language into what he names the “Natural Body Development Technique”. This built into a philosophy and a way of life with applications across all the art forms he practices culminating in Variations (2014), a solo stage performance which acts practically like a demonstration piece. This exhibition highlights the consistent relevance of the Natural Body Development Technique in the artist's research into the flowing connections between inner bodily energies and outside forces or existing parameters. Blending his experience of East and West, he advocates an organic anti-gravity-led loss of control to allow continuous movements and pictorial gestures in synch with the universe. 

About Shen Wei 

Born in 1968 in Hunan province, Shen Wei studied Chinese and Western painting, calligraphy and received professional opera training. He moved to New York in 1995 with a scholarship, and founded his own company, Shen Wei Dance Arts, in 2000 (www.shenweidancearts.org/). Primarily admired internationally for his contributions in the field of dance, as choreographer, designer and dancer, he was invited to be the lead choreographer for the Opening Ceremony of the 2008 Beijing Olympics. He lives and works between New York and Paris. 

Shen Wei has had solo exhibitions in Dallas, Hong Kong, Miami and New York. A major monograph was compiled in 2012: Everything is connected. The Art of Shen Wei. His performative installations and site-specific works have been presented in a number of museums and galleries including: The Metropolitan Museum of Art, the North Carolina Museum of Art, Collezione Maramotti in Italy, Mana Contemporary, the Forum at the Yerba Buena Center for the Arts, the Rockbund Museum of Art in Shanghai, the MDC Museum of Art + Design, New York Park Avenue Armory and the Isabella Stewart Gardner Museum, Boston. Shen Wei will have a solo exhibition at the Isabella Stewart Gardner Museum, Boston, in 2020.