Questions about Mao's cultural revolution are an implicit taboo in China's every day life. To look ahead is the name of the game. However, it is the starting point of the latest work by choreographer and dancer Wen Hui. She spent her childhood between the strict rules of commune-like livelihoods and the discovery of individuality. Together with the dancer Feng Dehua, Wen Hui develops the impressive eight hour performance «Memory» which focuses on the creative force of our body memory. Cocooned in transparent gauze the two artists steadily absorb our attention in a very peculiar and contemplative way. Our gaze then wanders through the gauze, through projections containing interviews of contemporary witnesses and excerpts of the documentary film «My Time in the Red Guards»by Wu Wenguang. What seems to be very strange and far away from our own reality in the beginning, slowly leads us to the urging question: How autonomous is our own thought, and to what extent are we the result of socialisation and ideology as well?

The company Living Dance Studio is generic for the Chinese performance scene. Together with the documentary film maker Wu Wenguang, Wen Hui founded the company in the mid 1990s without any public funding from Beijing. Three years ago she opened an own centre for the performing and video arts in Beijing. The centre maintains relationships to many European artists.

Continual coming and going possible!