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Gu Wenda () (born 1955, Shanghai) is a from China who lives and works in New York City. Much of his works are themed around traditional Chinese calligraphy and Chinese poetry. His works also often use human hair.
Gu lives in Brooklyn Heights with his wife, interior designer Kathryn Scott, though he also maintains studios in Shanghai and Xi'an in China.
Nevertheless, like many young Chinese of the time, Gu aspired to grow up to become one of the Red Guards, and eventually succeeded. As one of the Guards, he worked to simplify the Chinese language, and to encourage people to embrace new attitudes towards their old language; this was the time when he became educated in, and interested in, the traditional calligraphy which would later play a major role in his artworks. He was also taught woodcarving at this time, but relates it as being a strictly practical exercise, devoid of real creativity and art. He devoted much of his free time to dreams of art and fame, and to ink painting in private.
Though he was meant to later be sent off to a further wood-carving school, he was instead sent to design school, where he continued his pursuits in painting. Teachers at this school encouraged and aided him, and saw the beginning of his career as an artist. He would later study at the China Academy of Art in Hangzhou, under Lu Yanshao.Welsh, Eduardo; Del Lago, Francesca (2005). "Gu Wenda" in Encyclopedia of Contemporary Chinese Culture, edited by Edward Lawrence Davis. Routledge, p. 230. . Though he originally resisted tradition, he has since come to appreciate that one must understand tradition in order to better rebel against it.
After waiting for a student visa for five years, Gu came to the United States in 1987, at the age of 32, this journey being his first airplane experience. Asked if he left China for political reasons, he insists that, rather, he wanted to come to New York to seek a more international audience for his art, and to live and work in the contemporary art center of the world. After spending some time in San Francisco, he moved to New York, and put his art work aside for a year while he learned English, and served as artist-in-residence at the University of Minnesota for a few months.
Turning from his work on language, Gu developed an interest in bodily materials, and in understanding humanity, across ethnic and national boundaries, through hair and other bodily substances. One exhibit he produced, organized around sent to him by women from sixty countries, was attacked by feminist movements and refused to be shown at every venue he approached. Some of his other works included the use of semen and a placenta, which are supposedly far less shocking materials in China than in the West, as they are sometimes used as part of traditional Chinese medicine. However, most of his creations in this vein focus on hair. These are known collectively as the United Nations Project. The United Nations Project was exhibited in the Baker-Berry Library at Dartmouth College for four months in 2007.
In some places, such as Łódź, Poland, where his exhibition of piles of human hair were first seen, they have brought powerful resistance from those who see it as a reminder of the piles of hair generated at the Nazi concentration camps where Jewish prisoners had their heads shaved. The exhibition was closed in Poland after only twenty-four hours, and despite attempts to play up the international message and theme of his work, and to deny any intentional reference to The Holocaust or other such tragedies, the exhibit received a similar response in parts of Sweden, Russia, and Israel.
Gu's work today focuses extensively on ideas of culture, and his identity. He tends not to discuss or compare himself to other Chinese artists, and much of his work does not seek to embrace nor rebel against Chinese traditions. His work with human hair, including paintings created with a brush made from human hair, painted in public, continues the theme of the United Nations and seeks to evoke thoughts of human identity and unity.
In his work Temple of Heaven, he covers the room with ancient Chinese seal script: the oldest written form of the Chinese language, which most people can no longer speak. In other works he develops various unreadable texts based on language influences in the area in which he is creating an installment. Gu states that the unreadable texts are used to evoke the limitations of human knowledge. In his poster for the Cultural Revolution, Gu's use of miswritten, deformed, or crossed letters signifies the meaninglessness of the written word and the futility of human endeavor in a communist society.
On his website Gu states: 'During its more than ten year length, United Nations art project will travel throughout five continents, in approximately twenty different countries which I have selected due to their historical, civilization and political importance. By utilizing the real hair of the local living population, i'm strongly relating to their historical and cultural contexts, to create monumental installations and land arts to capture each country's identity, building on profound events in each country's history. These individual installations are national monuments to the whole art project of United Nations. The notions such as transculturalism, transnationalism, hybridization are goals of the final ceremony of the project. In a few years into twenty-first century, a giant wall will be composed solely from the pure human hair from the integration of the national monument events. The human hair woven world pseudo-languages co-existing on the wall.'
Timeline of United Nations
1993
From 1999 to 2001, Gu worked on Ink Alchemy, a project originating from the famous Shanghai Cao Sugong ink factory. It uses a genetic product made of powdered hair for an installation as well as for ink painting. About the concept behind "Ink Alchemy" Gu states: 'Traditionally, the Shanghai Medical Factory produces hair powder for medicinal purposes. Powdered human hair is used as a medical treatment for anxiety. In traditional ink fabrication, charcoal powder is used as the black pigment material. The medical factory has invented a hair powder especially formulated to be the fundamental pigment for my liquid ink and ink stick following the original Chinese prescription of powdered human hair, ironically and symbolically, the human hair-made ink is now given a conceptual function to cure cultural anxiety.'
He also worked on Tea Alchemy, which was created in a rice paper factory in Jing County in China that has made traditional rice paper for over a thousand years. Tea Alchemy uses green tea and traditional rice paper making methods to create green tea paper. Those national treasures of china are given a completely new meaning and life. GU states that 'this project will combine authentic green tea leaves with the historical method of making rice paper. The result is the “new way of tea” - the painting and writing on tea paper will create “new way of tea culture” or “cultured tea”, altering our experience from the enjoyment of drinking to the enjoyment of art.'
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