We’re excited to introduce you to the always interesting and insightful Jingqiu Guan. We hope you’ll enjoy our conversation with Jingqiu below.

Hi Jingqiu, thanks for joining us today. Did you always know you wanted to pursue a creative or artistic career? When did you first know?

I think I wanted to be an artist since when I was little. I was born and raised in Chengdu, China. I grew up studying Chinese dance, calligraphy, drawing, and digital piano. I was always encouraged to study art as long as it stays as a hobby, not a career. So when my teachers or family members used to ask me what I wanted to become after I grew up, I would answer that I wanted to be a diplomat. When I was 13, I made an American friend who was a few years younger. One day, I visited her at her home. Her mother asked me what I wanted to do in the future. I immediately answered that I wanted to be an artist. Now looking back, I am still intrigued by the fact that I was able to be so honest with an American family instead of my own family. Perhaps I already knew at the time that the desire to be an artist would be better accepted by her culture. When I was 18 I came to the US for undergraduate studies. That was when I knew even more clearly that I would like to pursue a creative path as a profession though it did take years for me to be able to make dance and film as a full-time endeavor.

Jingqiu, before we move on to more of these sorts of questions, can you take some time to bring our readers up to speed on you and what you do?

I am a choreographer and filmmaker. I currently teach at the Dance Program at Duke University as an Assistant Professor of the Practice. My primary artistic medium is dance film. I also create live dance performances, documentaries, and multimedia design for theatrical shows. My dance films often address social and cultural memories and issues of social justice. I center stories of women, people of color, immigrants, people who self-identify as disabled as I believe there needs to be more representation of their voices. I integrate documentary aesthetics in my experimental dance-moving image practices, blurring the boundary between fictional and nonfictional storytelling.

Justice has been a central lens into my works. For instance, my documentary Inside the Frame (2019) addresses the difficulties involved in efforts to practice inclusion in a classroom setting with community teachers with autism and students who do not. The Weight of Sugar (2021) is a dance film commenting on the lasting effects of sugar and plantation labor on women of color. I also created a series of dance documentaries on Dancing Disability Lab (2019-2023) at UCLA that imagine what it could look like for an institutional space to practice radical inclusion. What motivates me the most in an artistic process is the capacity of creative practices in shifting culture and thinking that can lead to a more just and compassionate society in a tangible way. 

In addition, my experience of motherhood since my first child was born in 2017 has definitely shifted my work. I began to enjoy involving my family in my dance films. Family Portrait (2019) will always be a special one to me. In this film I explore my familial connection and negotiation of my cultural identity through dancing with my grandmother, my father and my son. My two other dance films,  First Dance (2018) and First Dance 2.0 (2023), involve my sons when they were one-month old and 1-year old respectively. In these two works, I use dance film as a memory capsule to document the fleeting moments of these time-stamped stages of a little human’s life. I am finishing up a new dance documentary called Mama Dancers that features six professional dancers who are also mothers. I hope to premiere this work in early 2024.

Have any books or other resources had a big impact on you?

One book that impacted me as an artist is American author Steven Pressfield’s nonfiction The War of Art. In one of chapters, he talks about the difference between an amateur and a professional. One main attribute that separates them is how consistent they are with their work. A professional treats the act of engaging in artistic creation as a job and performs this act day in and day out while an amateur might love making art but is driven by an unstable energy of enthusiasm. The book has inspired me to be better at managing resistance and develop more consistency in my artistic process so I could move my own creative projects forward. I am still practicing it and continuously refining my own creative habits.

For you, what’s the most rewarding aspect of being a creative?

One of the most rewarding aspects of being an artist for me is the social impact a work could create and the transformative conversations it could enable. One of the most meaningful projects that I have involved in is working on the multimedia design for a one-man show Lyrics from Lockdown created by Tony nominated and Emmy award winning artist Bryonn Bain. The show addresses issues of mass incarceration and directly takes part in the efforts to bring justice to Nanon Williams who has been wrongfully incarcerated on death row for over 30 years. Working on artistic productions like this is so meaningful and inspiring as it fuses creativity with tangible social changes.

Another aspect is all the human connection that could be fostered in the process of making a work. My artistic process is always very collaborative. It involves conversations with other people, whether they are directly involved in the production, inform the process, or provide feedback to my works. Even the experience of presenting works to an audience is itself a gift of relationship building. Ultimately, it is the possibility to deepen the link between art and humanity that is divinely beautiful and rewarding to me.

Contact Info:

• Website: www.jingqiuguan.com
• Instagram: @jingqiu.guan

Image Credits
The credit for the first featured photo is: John West / Trinity Communications