About Meng Jinghui

Meng Jinghui is arguably the most influential director of avant-garde Chinese theatre today. He has helped to bring many modern Western classics to China, as well as iconoclastic productions which humorously deconstruct classic Chinese works. Meng's productions thereby become commentaries on community life, social order and artistic conventions. While still a graduate student at the Central Academy of Drama in 1988, he directed plays by Pinter, Ionesco, Beckett, and Genet. In 1992, he joined the National Theater Company of China, then known as the Central Experimental Theater Troupe, a breeding ground for new theatre. In the ensuing years, Meng has created and directed more than fifteen plays. Working within a country and an artistic scene that is in the midst of rapid change, Meng's goal is to bring recent developments in Chinese art, "such as installations, multimedia, visual art, and action," to the Chinese stage.