A Beautiful Mindscape

Shen Wei is a master mover between worlds—between East and West, between choreography and painting, between process and product, between the physical and the spiritual, and I could go on. With his blend of binaries, he brings us his latest work “Mindscape,” performed over a four-night run at Lincoln Center’s outdoor Dance Encounters series during Chinese Arts Week. This follows its US premiere one week prior at the American Dance Festival at Duke University in Durham, North Carolina, and its world premiere in early June at the spectacular Guangzhou Opera House in the city of Guangzhou, Guangdong Province, China.

Performance

Shen Wei Arts and Guangdong Modern Dance Company: “Mindscape” by Shen Wei

Place

Hearst Plaza, Lincoln Center, New York, NY, July 22, 2026

Words

Karen Greenspan

Shen Wei Arts and Guangdong Modern Dance Company in “Mindscape” by Shen Wei. Photograph by Steven Pisano

The mindscape, or “landscape of the soul or spirit” as Shen Wei describes it, is an area of research he has been exploring since 2023 in his paintings and dances. This concept reflects traditional Chinese philosophical ideals regarding art and spiritual pursuit as a way of life. Through self-cultivation, continuous exploration, and elevation of one’s mindscape, one attains inner harmony and transcendence. Even Shen Wei’s unique dance technique, which he calls “Natural Body Development” (taught in many university dance curricula), addresses “mental space.”

Upon arriving at the performance site at Lincoln Center’s Hearst Plaza, one sees Shen Wei’s signature set-up—white canvas dance floor (actually, a white plush carpet because it is more kind to the dancers’ bodies when performing on concrete) and buckets of bright-colored tempera paint at each end. At this particular site, behind the dance floor is the rectangular Paul Milstein Reflecting Pool with its glass-like surface and substantial Henry Moore Reclining Figure. And behind that is the sloping, grass-covered terrace. Shen Wei puts all these elements to use in building out his greater canvas.

Setting the piece into motion, veteran company member Zak Ryan Schlegel, wearing a bright orange unitard, circles the plaza on roller blades to a recorded score of drama-inducing Chinese drumming. A giant windmill spins over his head mounted from the pack he has strapped on his back. As he removes his props and steps onto the white canvas, we see numbers of dancers (22 to be exact) decked in colorful, bright-hued unitards infiltrating the three spaces—the slope, the water, and the canvas floor—all wearing small windmills on various parts of their body. The mood is pleasantly surreal.

Shen Wei Arts and Guangdong Modern Dance Company in “Mindscape” by Shen Wei. Photograph by Steven Pisano

The large dance cast includes twelve principal dancers on the canvas. Five are US-based dancers from Shen Wei Dance Arts joined by seven from China’s Guangdong Modern Dance Company (GMDC). The connections run deep and full circle as Shen Wei was a founding member of GMDC, China’s first modern dance company. The ten additional dancers that wade and submerge in the water and climb and descend the green slope hail from both countries.

A dancer in purple heads into the center of the canvas with contemporary, sweeping, full body movements. He is soon replaced by other individual dancers moving in a vocabulary that is unabashedly modern, grounded in strong technique, yet uncolored by stylistic overlay. Live narration is spoken by two dancers standing at opposite ends of the dance floor. We first hear words in Chinese and then in English: “A place full of color; A place full of joy… it’s a landscape in my heart, in my mind …” The words are drawn from a series of poems penned by Shen Wei that form the inspiration for “Mindscape,” a total art piece integrating physical language, music, texts, installation, and live dance painting. It should be noted that this site-specific, 45-minute work performed at Lincoln Center is an abridged version of the full-scale 90-minute theater production, with live music—using projections of the dancers shot from above as opposed to dancing in the water and on the slope.

Partnering sequences of swirling bodies form a flowing human calligraphy, backgrounded by strummed tones of the guqin (seven-stringed Chinese zither). In fact, the music is another blending-ground of traditional and contemporary—arranged by film score composer Munkhjul.

Shen Wei Arts and Guangdong Modern Dance Company in “Mindscape” by Shen Wei. Photograph by Steven Pisano

Drifting away from the canvas, the dancers wade into the pool forming a circle for a gentle water dance. Refreshed from the immersion, the dancers gather at the buckets along the edges of the canvas to put on paint-saturated mitts to swirl their colors (same as their costumes) directly onto the floor. Thrusting and slapping their bodies onto the ground in circular and linear patterns, they dance their mark onto the canvas. This exploration and practice of connecting movement to paint to canvas started back in 2001 when Shen Wei began work on “The Rite of Spring.” Back then, he limited the palette to black and white. This is not the case now. “Mindscape” is a symphony in color.

The drama builds with each new application of paint. Some dancers pour cupfuls of color onto the canvas and themselves as they converge in duos and eventually in an interconnected group. Other dancers dip their socks into the pigment for a standing transfer of color. Fierce drumming frames the climax as the dancers walk onto the canvas bearing full buckets of tempera. They kneel and gracefully pour the liquid color over their bodies like a ritual immersion. Then in a complete merging of color, movement, and surfaces, the dancers roll, slide, swivel, and connect with the floor and each other. The dancers are brush and canvas—their costumes and faces slathered with every color.

After each performer dance-painted a final mark across the canvas ending with a reverent bow, Shen Wei offered a few remarks. He gestured to the site saying, “Here we have everything we need—the mountain, the water, and the people.” Because Shen Wei has the vision of a painter, he could see the requisite elements of Chinese landscape painting in Lincoln Center’s outdoor plaza and transform them . . . into “Mindscape.”

Karen Greenspan

Karen Greenspan is a New York City-based dance journalist and frequent contributor to Natural History Magazine, Dance Tabs, Ballet Review, and Tricycle among other publications. She is also the author of Footfalls from the Land of Happiness: A Journey into the Dances of Bhutan, published in 2019.

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