Shen Wei At The Pocantico Center: Dance Is Painting

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Shen Wei ancers perform an excerpt of Connect Transfer (without paint) at the Pocantico Center

October 24, 2025

By Elizabeth Tucker—

Still/Moving, an exhibition spanning two venues, presents a thirty-year retrospective of the Chinese artist Shen Wei. Shen first trained as an opera singer and studied painting and Chinese calligraphy before co-founding a modern dance company and moving to the US in the late 1990s.

The earlier body of his work, devoted to the connection between music, moving bodies, and painted marks as their trail or imprint, can be seen at the Katonah Museum of Art. These include Movement No. 5 (Slide-Turn A in Black) and Movement No. 6 (Slide-Turn B in Gray), in which Shen literally danced paint onto the canvas using his feet. At the Pocantico Center are Shen’s more recent paintings, which began from an investigation of texture and create imaginary landscapes through a slow accumulation of dripped, poured, or brushed paint material. In a conversation with viewers, Wei explained that as an artist who has constantly been obligated to travel, paintings such as the Mindscapeseries offer a landscape of the spirit that he is able to inhabit whenever he needs to. Each exhibition is designed to give viewers a complete overview, with videos and a pictorial timeline in addition to the paintings.

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Shen’s dance company, Shen Wei Dance Arts, completed two week-long residencies at the Pocantico Center during which they created a dance piece (still an untitled work in progress), excerpts of which were shown at the Guggenheim Museum and the Pocantico Center. Elly Weisenberg Kelly, Manager of Public Programs and Residencies, said that the space at the Pocantico Center offers a rare opportunity for an entire dance company to come together in a residency. In Shen’s account, the residency at the Pocantico Center gave his company food and a place to sleep, and that was enough—more art would be made if everyone had these fundamental things.

At the Katonah Museum on Sunday afternoon, dancers performed an excerpt of Connect Transfer (2004), originally performed during the opening ceremony of the Beijing Olympics in 2008. In the museum courtyard under tall spruce trees, a large, blank canvas was spread on the ground. The four dancers, entering with a paint-soaked sponge in one hand, began by making curving marks on the ground. As the dance progressed, the painting on the floor became denser, and the dancers’ bodies acquired different-colored stains and splotches, until finally, their bodies were completely saturated. In describing his choreographic technique, Shen said the dancers “treat their bodies like liquid, like a brush, like they don’t have bones.”

Katrina London, curator at the Pocantico Center, described the highly unconventional mixture of materials in the paintings there: Shen uses oil and acrylic together with watercolor, combines washes with thick impasto, “almost like he has invented his own techniques.” For the Reflecting Element series, Shen held himself to a single hue of dark brown paint, which he applied in thin layers over a yellow canvas, to create an effect reminiscent of lava: a glowing underlying liquid that coalesces into a dark, rippling or billowing surface topography.

The exhibition is on view at both locations until mid-April.