Wenda Gu

Canberra, National Gallery of Australia, Intersections and Translations, October 2001 - April 2002
Denton, University of North Texas Art Gallery; Kansas City Art Institute; Portland, Maine Art Institute, Gu Wenda: From Middle Kingdom to Biological Millennium, 2003 - 2004

Translating Visuality Wenda Gu: Forest of Stone Steles: Retranslation & Rewriting of Tang Poetry, Shenzhen, Exh. Cat., November 2005, pp. 128-129, illustrated

Gu Wenda’s Forest of Stone Steles: Retranslation and Rewriting of Tang Poetry No. 4 is one of fifty stone steles of identical dimensions hand carved in the artist’s carving studio in Xi’an, China, a city imbued with the ancient history of stone carving and home to the Museum of the Forest of Stone Steles.  Gu’s own Forest of Stone Steles was conceived in 1993 and required dozens of craftsmen and collaborators for its extended execution over a period of twelve years.  The recent culmination of this epic body of work marks a significant milestone in the artist’s career and, with his ongoing United Nations series, is the artist’s most monumental achievement to date.  Sotheby’s is pleased to offer for the first time a work from either of these series.

A leading figure in the ’85 New Art Movement, which served as the springboard for subsequent developments in Chinese contemporary art, Gu immigrated to the United States in 1987, and his trans-cultural experience has inspired the majority of his production since.  In the artist’s words, the Forest of Stone Steles “reflects the changing world of cultural import and export, cultural assimilation and alienation from each other, and consummation of one culture by another.  It is a representation of modern day historical facts and epic stories.” (Gu Wenda, Translating Visuality – Wenda Gu:  Forest of Stone Steles – Retranslation and Rewriting of Tang Poetry, p.293-292, 287.)

Like all steles in the series, No. 4 is made of top-quality black nephrite, traditionally known as Ink Jade King.  Painstakingly quarried by hand rather than blasting in order to prevent any imperfections in the material, the more than 70 tons required for the Forest of Stone Steles (each weighs 1.3 tons) were mined from the same site fifty kilometers from Xi’an that provided material for the ancient stone works housed in the city’s Museum of the Forest of Stone Steles.  However, as Cheng Zheng, professor of art history at the Xi’an Academy of Fine Arts, writes, “Such a project may be exceptional even in the thousand-year history of stele carving” due to its scale and complexity. (Cheng Zheng, “Four-eyed Wenda Gu – How Wenda Gu Creates His Steles” (Eng. Trans. Wen Jingen), in ibid., 333-336, 335.)

For each stele, Gu selected a Tang Dynasty (618-907) poem and its translation from Witter Bynner’s popular anthology The Jade Mountain; these texts are carved at the right of the stele.  From Bynner’s translations, Gu provides his own transliteration of English phonetics back into Chinese.  That is, he approximates with Chinese phonetics the aural qualities of spoken English, creating what he calls a “Post Tang” poem, which appears as the stele’s central inscription and is rendered in a Regular Script Calligraphy style (zhang kai), which the artist himself developed.  As a final step, Gu translates at the left of the stele the meaning of the Post Tang poem back into English, adding there for posterity, in both Chinese and English, details of the project’s completion.

The transformative transliteration is the conceptual fulcrum upon which the meaning of each stele and the project itself turns.  If the artist’s transliteration yields an apparently random result, he must nevertheless have chosen from a variety of Chinese homonyms in order to build a plausible, if still nonsensical Post Tang poem.  And while the expanse of suggestive imagery in the Post Tang poem derived from “A Spring Morning” in No. 4 fails to coalesce into a coherent Chinese landscape, only a refined poetic intelligence could find the peaceful clarity of “Great waves become silent, laying low in the hazy evening” within the ambiguous flow of phonemes and the variety of their possible linguistic representations.  In this sense, Gu’s subjective intelligence, inscribed at the center of each stele composition, is a metaphor for the viewer’s own quest for meaning amidst the confusing flux of contemporary experience.

The radical transformations brought about by the forces of globalization have heightened our sense of the world’s complexity, but if The Forest of Stone Steles is a response to the ‘modern day historical fact’ of the artist’s trans-cultural life, the ‘epic story’ the project presents is steeped in “a profound sense of history, agglomerating Gu’s traditional cultural education with his respect for Chinese culture.” (Wu Hung, “Monumentality and Anti-monumentality in Wenda Gu’s Forest of Stone Steles – Retranslation and Rewriting of Tang Poetry (Eng. Trans., David Mao), in ibid., 295-300, 300.)Indeed, the wealth of knowledge evident in the work’s conception and execution reveals the artist’s mastery of the varied traditions defining China’s own epic story, even as it is “a deconstructive work full of modernity, reflecting his deep suspicion of the broader macroscopical complexities of narration and the forces of globalization.” (Ibid.) 

Ultimately, it is this play of paradox, both formal and historical, that gives The Forest of Stone Steles its expressive resonance and richness of meaning:  the contemporary city of Xi’an, where the artist’s stones were quarried and carved, was once called Chang’an and was the capital of the Tang Dynasty, which many scholars consider the highpoint of Chinese civilization, when its artistic culture flourished most abundantly.  Originally inspired by the inevitable loss of meaning in the translation of poetry from one cultural and linguistic context to another, Gu juxtaposes this venerated ancient poetry with his contemporary derivations based upon chance.  The monumental role of steles in fixing historical facts in stone is ironically redeployed at the service of a grand project that declares fixed meaning inconclusive and facts, like language itself, ephemeral.  Even the upright, vertical orientation of traditional steles is submitted to a ninety-degree rotation that transforms the monumental signifier of historical record into a somber epitaph for definitive conclusions, albeit one whose sobriety is belied by the artist’s whimsical transliterations.  Trained in traditional ink painting and calligraphy, Gu continues to develop the calligraphic tradition today, even as he pursues with a vengeance the anti-traditional tack that has characterized his avant-garde practice since the development of illegible “Chinese” pseudo-characters in the early 1980s.

Precisely poised upon the millennial turning point that increasingly seems to define the transition from an ‘American’ to a ‘Chinese century,’ and critically reviewing past traditions while reinvigorating them in the present, Gu Wenda’s Forest of Stone Steles is an embodiment of contemporary cosmopolitanism, couched in an ancient national idiom.  Forest of Stone Steles is therefore not only a significant monument of contemporary art, but also a timely allegory for the process of cultural and historical transformation.