As the opening production in this year’s Dance Umbrella, Wind Shadow embodies two key aspects of London’s annual festival of contemporary dance. The first is its internationalism. Wind Shadow comes to us from Cloud Gate Dance Theatre of Taiwan, while other Umbrella attractions hail from North America, Europe and — especially this year — Africa. The second is the festival’s willingness to think outside accepted artistic boundaries. Wind Shadow may seem one of its more conventional offerings — it takes place on a stage, after all — but in many ways it’s really a stunning piece of kinetic visual art.

A collaboration between choreographer (and Cloud Gate founder) Lin Hwai-Min and visual artist Cai Guo-Qiang, Wind Shadow uses a monochromatic palette to paint a giant moving canvas of light and shadow or, perhaps more accurately, to illustrate a hellish plunge into an ultimate darkness. It starts with a white kite, kept flying by what must be one of several fans in the wings. For the next 80 minutes, there is an abundance of fabric (be it flags, wings or sails) that billows in a manufactured breeze, or plunges from on high like a waterfall. The choreography, for an ensemble of 20 dancers, tries to capture the elusive qualities of wind.

At times it feels as if the movement is growing from the ground up, like a tree or a flower; at others it circles the stage like a feather riding a puff of air. Throughout, it is achingly slow and stark (not for nothing do these dancers study t’ai chi and meditation along with modern dance and ballet). But Lin’s vocabulary is sewn with an extremely slim thematic thread, and whenever the movement begins to drag, which is often, the production is forced to rely on the hypnotic beauty of its visuals.

The dancers are in two groups. The ones who are covered head to toe in black (including their faces) are the shadows who haunt the “real” dancers, and interact with them. As the piece progresses, these shadows start to look like a pestilence of ants. By the end, when a black snowfall has carpeted the stage in intimations of disaster, they suggest the sole survivors of a nuclear holocaust, crawling out of their holes to lick their wounds. The final scene, with its searching green laser beam, is an extraordinary evocation of apocalypse which seems to engulf the audience in a black hole. A fun night out? Definitely not. But an incomparable feast for the eye.

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