Eiko Otake and Wen Hui on “What is War”

By Jenny Wu, Eiko Otake, Wen Hui
October 20, 2025
Interviews

During their collaborative performance What is War (2025), one of the objects that the artists Eiko Otake and Wen Hui manipulate onstage is a large, wheeled panel whose shape is reminiscent of a blackboard or a protest banner. Its surface is a grimy, warped mirror. Otake and Hui push the panel around, and at times – when they aren’t trudging, stumbling, flailing, and crawling around the stage, contorting their bodies around and against each other – they perform slow, tense solo choreographies in front of it. The mirror doubles their faces and torsos, echoing their movements and monologues throughout the hour-long program.

Originally co-commissioned by the Walker Art Center, CAP UCLA, Jacob’s Pillow, and Colorado College’s Dance and Theater Department, What is War draws from Otake’s experience coming-of-age in post-World War II Japan, and Hui’s memories of growing up in China during its Cultural Revolution. Employing visual, spoken, and written language together, the choreographers excavate their respective family histories to weave solidarities across geopolitics, histories, authoritarianism, and war. It will be performed as part of Brooklyn Academy of Music’s Next Wave 2025 programming from October 21 to 25.

Ahead of its run at BAM, I spoke with Otake and Hui. The two have been friends since 1995 and collaborators since 2020, and evinced a kind of artistic and interpersonal chemistry that reminded me of the relationship one might have with one’s own reflection. They are by turns intimates, antagonists, strangers, and stewards of one another. We discussed the inspiration and process of creating What is War, war’s impact on the body and language, and being a bad student to be a good historian.

Eiko Otake and Wen Hui performing What is War. Photo by Jingqui Guan.
Eiko Otake and Wen Hui performing What is War. Photo by Jingqui Guan.
Jenny Wu: The idea for What is War came about while the two of you were making your feature film No Rule is Our Rule (2020) during the COVID-19 pandemic. The footage from that film was shot when you were together in China, right when lockdown began. In previous interviews, you’ve mentioned a detail from this period, which is that when you two were sheltering in place with Wen’s mother, you watched a Chinese television program about the 1944 Japanese bombing of Kunming. Were the emotions that this television program evoked in some way a catalyst for thinking about What is War?
Eiko Otake: This TV program was just one thing. It just so happened that I was in China during its lockdown. And it just so happened that I was already together with Wen for months and we had become very close. We were near Stone Forest National Park, where we just did our recording and dancing [for No Rule is Our Rule]. Everything we had done, including going to Nanjing [the site of the 1937–38 Nanjing Massacre] together, were the catalysts [for What is War]. So was the process of editing the film, which was really a one-month video diary. I was back in New York. Wen was in Kunming, then Beijing, then France. We could not be together physically, so we were just editing, talking, editing, and talking. We talked about the Second World War.
Wen Hui: For me, [a catalyst for What is War] was when Eiko visited Beijing and gave a lecture at the Inside-Out Art Museum. Eiko told a story about her father. During the Second World War, he refused to come to China. He thought, “If I go to war, I will either be killed by someone or I will kill someone.” When he made the decision not to go to war, a doctor helped him make himself sick. This story was a very strong one for me because [it shows that] as an individual you can make a decision, even in a big war. I think that when many people hear this story they will think, “We can make our own decisions.”
EO: There were many individuals making choices [in mid-20th-century Japan], even in that particular fascist militaristic nation.
JW: You developed What is War over several years at various academic and cultural institutions in the US, such as Duke University, the University of Texas Austin, and the Walker Art Center. What was it like to move around with the piece and to share early versions of it with different audiences?
EO: There were a number of work-in-progress showings at American academic institutions and creative residencies, because I had to find a place where Wen and I could be together. Our film was made over Zoom meetings because we already had footage. But now we had to find a place [to meet]. What was really inspiring to both of us were the people and communities [associated with these institutions]. Sometimes my friends would come, or people older [than us] would come, and they would begin to tell us, after we performed, their own stories about war. The friends were people I’ve known for a long time, and I did not know [they had experiences with war]. There were many different reasons for certain people to do certain things.
JW: In the performance, you two also speak, sometimes in dialogue, sometimes in monologue.
EO: We speak, and the audience speaks back sometimes. We just performed at Colorado College, and we created a long table. We had many people, who could just come in and talk, and then they could leave. Not only were we talking, but people were talking to us.
“I feel strongly that war is linked to every person. Our bodies are connected to this war. Every war will interfere with your body.” —Wen Hui
JW: There’s also an element of text and writing in What is War. At a point in the performance, you write on each other’s naked bodies, and then you walk through the audience with the writing on your skin. During a talk at the Walker Art Center, Eiko, you said, “War makes people naked.” I’m curious if you think of inscribing the body as a way to clothe it or dignify it? Or a way of releasing something that’s been held inside it in silence?
WH: I think there are different levels to this. When I write on Eiko’s body, I’m writing a letter to my grandmother. My grandmother was killed during the Second World War. A Japanese airplane attacked Kunming. A bomb came down close by her house. She was sick and could not run to the bomb shelter. The bomb came down, and she died of shock. I never met my grandmother. When my grandmother died, my mother was only five years old. So that’s what I write. I feel strongly that war is linked to every person. Our bodies are connected to this war. Every war will interfere with your body.
EO: When we speak, we are using here [Eiko touches her throat and mouth]. It’s a movement. We speak words, speak a story, but we also have writing. In two scenes, we speak, and it makes sense to me that we also write. She’s Chinese, I’m Japanese. I grew up in Japan. The roots [of our respective languages] are the same. When she writes, I understand some of it. When I write, she almost always understands the meaning of the kanji. Then there is a sense of prayer, like writing Buddhist script on the body. I’m writing about the Japanese constitution [on Wen’s body] which is almost like a prayer for me because our constitution tells us that we cannot fight [in war]. But [that part of the constitution] has always been in danger. American and Japanese right-wingers have wanted to change it. We’re in conflict with our constitution. To me, by writing a prayer to her body, we are working out the conflict together.
JW: Do you think some forms of performance are more public or private than others?

EO: No Rule is Our Rule is all about private life. To go back to your original question about the TV, in the very beginning of the pandemic, everybody was stricken by fear, realizing that your private life was so connected to public life. We were watching and recording TV programs, not only about the Second World War but also about the pandemic. There was a performance of heroism going on on Chinese national television: “We will conquer this. We will save everyone.”

I have also made [work of] me dancing alone in Fukushima [A Body in Fukushima (2014–19)]. I didn’t have an audience there, but I was dancing, and there was a photographer [William Johnston]. Is that a private performance? Is it a public performance? It’s both. The process of editing [the documentation] became a performance, and then I brought Fukushima and my dancing in Fukushima to the public by way of photo exhibitions, video installations, and films. You can call what I’ve done private because only one photographer and myself were present. But there is also another aspect. Onstage when we speak, are we doing theater? No. We are talking to the audience. In a way, we are being our private selves.

“Often, people are told that a war is a ‘right war.’ And after you lose, it was a ‘wrong war.’” —Eiko Otake
WH: For me, “onstage” and “backstage” are all one thing. What’s important is yourself, facing the audience, talking about what you want to talk about, not acting. Not [playing] a character, as in traditional theater. What’s important is that we are on the stage and that we talk about our own family memories, our own family histories. The truth.
EO: She’s got a point there, but I’ll also add a contradiction: We also have fear. We also curate [our speech depending on] whom we are talking to. Are you talking to your friends, or are you talking to the police? Are you talking to the IRS? We change, we think differently. It doesn’t mean we lie – we just curate. And at a dangerous time like this, many people are forced to curate and make certain decisions. How much do we say with words? Could we speak instead with our bodies? That makes a difference.
Eiko Otake and Wen Hui performing What is War. Photo by Zhou Huiyini.
JW: The title of your work, What is War, contains no question mark. This makes me think that while you two and members of the audience, afterwards, speak about memories and experiences of war, the performance isn’t really asking us to define war per se, perhaps because it can’t be understood in a systematic way.
EO: Often, people are told that a war is a “right war.” And after you lose, it was a “wrong war.” But war cannot be separated into “right wars” and “wrong wars.” It is killing, and it is grotesque. In one scene, we go upstage, all the way upstage, against the wall, and we make ourselves very small. War makes us small.
JW: And especially so when you experience it as a child, when you have usually much less power to make decisions.
WH: I grew up during the Chinese Cultural Revolution, but I was not a part of the Cultural Revolution. I was a child then. I didn’t participate in the movements or attend political meetings. My parents spent every day in political meetings, after sending me to kindergarten. My childhood was very lonely [because of these meetings].
EO: I was born in 1952. My parents were married in 1945 because my father basically dodged [the Second World War]. We grew up hearing lots of air raid stories. Every July before summer break, the textbooks would be full of stories about air raids. Or the atomic bomb. But not too many stories about the Japanese army going to China or to Korea and killing people. Because who wants to talk about it when they come back? I have a problem with the way I grew up. Japan really wanted to have peace, but they only remembered being bombed. Japan had done the same to Kunming, but what really happened during the war often was not discussed.
JW: Do you think, then, that one must be a bad student in order to be a good historian?
EO: Being a bad student doesn’t mean you don’t want to learn. I just don’t want to be in a system where the system tells you how to be a student. I’m my own learner. I’ve tended to question the system. I’m a bad student with a sense of pride. I don’t want to be curated by the power. I want to curate myself.
WH: When Eiko was in school, she’d skip class to go to demonstrations. I skipped class in Beijing to go to the Rauschenberg exhibition [ROCI China (November 1985). It was the first solo exhibition by a Western artist to take place in mainland China following the Cultural Revolution].
EO: Skipping class is an important sign that you’ve started to make your own decisions.

What is War will be presented at Brooklyn Academy of Music from October 21 to 25.

—Jenny Wu is the US-based associate editor of ArtReview. She lives in New York and writes about the city in her column, ‘Notes from New York’. She teaches writing in the visual arts department at Brooklyn College CUNY, and her criticism and essays have appeared in newspapers, magazines, artists’ books, and catalogues. Her recent projects include curating performances and experimenting with writing as performance.

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