The dancer, choreographer and culture manager Jin Xing lives and works in Shanghai, where she has been heading her own company, the Jin Xing Dance Theatre, since 2000.

Owing to her unusual past, including the first sex change ever to have taken place with official sanction in China, she is now one of the best known creators of culture in a society which has keenly been sampling new values, life-styles and aesthetic forms of expression.

Jin Xing was born in 1969 as the only son of a couple from Korea and was given her first training as a dancer while in the army, which at that time was the best teacher of dancing.

She went through all stages of military training while also learning Russian ballet, classical Chinese dancing and acrobatics but suffered for having the soul of a woman in a man's body. In the then China it took a lot of patience and renunciation to get her way.

With the surgical and medical change of sex which she underwent over several months from 1994-95, she acquired a new sense of her existence.

Jin Xing is now the only free-lance choreographer and director of an independent dance group in the whole of China. With commercial appearances of all kinds, including modelling and television appearances and commercials, she earns enough to live grandly with a house and car of her own. She has also turned to work in films and runs a hotel and small theatre.

Not only has her lifestyle changed. She has also bid farewell to all main roles in the Chinese style, to revolutionary ballet and to lyrical figural sequences. "I used to be a dance-machine" she said once with a smile. Now she is still keen to dance but only such roles, parts and themes as really interest her, and increasingly in an enthusiastic exchange with Western choreographers and ensembles.

In "Person to Person" (2002) for instance, produced for the House of World Cultures, the Berlin group Rubato and Jin Xing first wished to work on gender aspects of the movements of dancing, but Jin Xing was really not very keen on the theme.

It was already seven years since she had managed more or less to free herself from social norms and economic pressure, enabling her to assert the femininity of her movements.

She no longer wished to treat it as a problem - so viewers were offered no exotic scenes of Chinese ballet or a Shakespearean show of sexual confusion, with a man dancing as a woman impersonating a man. But "Person to Person" does have a lot to communicate about changes of sexual, social, artistic and political identity and how dancing can help define one's own way of life.

According to Jin Xing this is not to be had without paying a high price, but she herself embodies the will to pay it: "Complete happiness costs absolute pain. Only whoever suffers can live!" she says. Elsewhere she declares: "There is always enough space to accomplish something incredible."

Jin's biography
Jin Xing was born in 1969 in Shenyang in the province Liaoning as the child of Korean immigrants. At 9 years of age he managed with difficulty to persuade his parents to let him go to an army school offering training in dancing. At the age of 17 he attained the rank of a colonel and was judged to be China's best dancer.

Further honours followed through his taking part in national dancing competitions. In 1988 he was awarded a one-year scholarship to the Modern Dance Company in New York, where he studied under Murray Louis.

In 1991 he won the Best Choreographer Award at an American Dance Festival, in 1991 he began teaching at a centre for expressive dancing in Rome, then he lived till the end of 1993 as a dancer and choreographer in New York, Rome and Brussels.

Even before his sex-change, Jin Xing had founded the semi-public Beijing Modern Dance Ensemble, followed in 2000 by the Shanghai Jin Xing Dance Theatre. Jin Xing is now living with two adopted children in an historical villa in the colonial district of Shanghai.