Upon forming his American company in 2000, Chinese-born choreographer Shen Wei did something extremely rare: He shot straight to the highest level of modern dance. A darling of the Lincoln Center Festival (three straight invitations), the American Dance Festival, Jacob’s Pillow, and the Kennedy Center, Mr. Shen’s company had never even performed at the Joyce Theater — the usual stepping-stone to loftier venues — until this past Tuesday.

The reasons for Mr. Shen’s exceptional rise were readily apparent at the Joyce, where his company performed both a young classic (his 2003 “Rite of Spring”) and a New York premiere, entitled “Re- (Part One).” From the moment Mr. Shen’s dancers took the stage, the audience was rapt. Mr. Shen’s luminous stage pictures cast a spell.

The works in his compact canon have certain common ingredients: lush visuals, hypnotic patterning, wondrously strange movements, and a cool, geometric precision. Yet each Shen Wei dance also has its own unique flavor, from the ghostly half-nude figures of “Near the Terrace” to the futuristic oversize skulls of “Folding” to the bouncing rag dolls of “Map.”

In the new “Re-” (as in re-birth, renewal), the scene is Tibet, but not the mountains-and-monasteries version. Mr. Shen’s crisp, sparse stage picture — an inky black background, a floor strewn with blue and white paper shards — is almost a chamber in a Tibetan’s meditating mind. Seated at center stage, a Tibetan nun (Ani Choying Dolma) performs traditional Buddhist chants in her rich alto.

As the curtain rises, the paper shreds are arrayed in perfect lines, in the formation of circles and squares. This is a proxy for the kind of sacred mandala that Tibetan lamas painstakingly create with colored sand, then immediately destroy (a metaphor for the impermanence of life).

With the first steps of their purple-stained feet, the four dancers scatter paper. The blue and white shards sparkle prettily under the cool white lighting, tumbling through the air like snow brushed off a pine branch. Gradually, as the dancers brush the floor with their feet, or drop and roll across the stage, the original patterns are wiped away.

Yet even as he’s blurring his set’s geometry, Mr. Shen is focusing the eye on other visual blueprints. The dancers’ loose burgundy tunics and flowing brown trousers de-emphasize their flesh, drawing your eye to the geometric lines of their limbs. When a dancer balances on one leg, tilting slightly forward, one leg behind her at a diagonal, and arms raised forward, her body seems to be all straight lines. The dancers are arrayed for most of the piece in three-against-one formations, continually forming four-sided polygons with the visual focus at a single corner.

Like the visuals, the dancing is inspired by meditation. Movement originates from deep breathing and from the center of the body. The pace is slow, and dancers hold difficult balances for long counts with deep concentration. An arm rises at the pace of an intake of breath. A purely relaxed torso undulates with the ease of a shirt billowing on a clothesline.

The periodic repetition of bent waists, raised limbs, falling bodies, cyclical chants, and swirling confetti produced a potent hypnotic effect. But whereas the best of Mr. Shen’s dances are riveting from moment to moment, “Re-” fails to command the same breathless attention. One doesn’t quite feel the fabled purity of Tibet or enter the stark, otherworldly Shen Wei dreamscape.

A potent dreamscape did, however, open the program. Mr. Shen’s “Rite of Spring” (2003) was set on a slate-like stage crisscrossed by chalky triangles and squares, with 12 dancers dressed in simple gray and charcoal clothes streaked with white lines, almost as if they were the tubes of pigment used in making the mural beneath their feet.

A two-piano version of the Stravinsky kicks up — an ethereal, tinkling noise that the dance treats as pure sound and rhythm. This may be an objectivist “Rite of Spring,” but the music’s drama still seeps into the movement.

There are two main modes of dancing here: contained little steps with bodies upright, arms at the dancers’ sides; and brash, liquid moves that slither to the floor or swivel across the stage. Both are executed with thrilling precision by Mr. Shen and his fine company.

Propelled by rhythms, bound by discernable laws of movement, these bodies move because they must. Cold and fascinatingly alien (under David Ferri’s expert lighting), they are spatial markers as much as anything else; the visual design they trace onstage is as much their reason for being as their dancing.

Three years on, “Rite of Spring” still feels bracingly new — the product of an imagination unique in the history of dance.

Until October 1 (175 Eighth Ave. at 19th Street, 212-242-0800).