Gu Wenda is best known for his extraordinary installations comprised of human bodily substances: powdered placenta, blood, and hair. Born in Shanghai, he studied at the Shanghai Arts & Crafts School before continuing onto the Zhejiang Academy of Fine Arts in Hangzhou. The artist's early training in traditional Chinese painting laid the foundation for much of his provocative later work, which often involves the manipulation of Chinese calligraphy using the extraordinary range of media that his practice has come to be associated with.
Read MoreImmediately after completing his studies in the 1980s, Gu created a series of pseudo-ideograms that resemble Chinese characters. When the works were shown at Xi'an Artists Gallery in 1986, the authorities closed the exhibition prematurely on the presumption that the illegible characters contained a subversive message; only professional artists were allowed in when it reopened. In his interview with Ocula Magazine in 2014, Gu said that his large ink paintings held 'a kind of double power: these ink works were both scholarly and socialist—they represented the two major schools of thought and authority in China at the time.' Although such works placed the artist as a major figure in the 1985 New Wave movement in China, like many of his artistic compatriots he left China for the West and now permanently resides in New York.
Gu's own experience of crossing borders and living a life outside of his own home country possibly inspired a fascination with the permeability of cultural boundaries. His most ambitious project, 'United Nations', consists of installations at sites around the world; and involves the use of human hair to create flags. The work draws attention to the tenuous nature of cultural divisions, and also presents a utopian possibility of humanity united. The work equally presents a manipulation of language and exploration and re-interpretation of traditional Chinese modes of expression—an approach that can be seen in other works by the artist, such as Forest of Stone Steles—Retranslation & Rewriting of Tang Poetry, for which the artist manipulated, juxtaposed, and layered translations and re-translations of poetry from the Tang dynasty. In Tea Alchemy and Ink Alchemy, too, the artist explored traditional Chinese materials as a means to address wider global concerns.
Ocula | 2019
