Wenda Gu

(i) (ii) signed in Pinyin, dated 4.1986 and stamped with artist's seal
(iii) signed in Pinyin, dated 4.86 and stamed with artist's seal

Private Collection, Asia

China, Xi'an, Shaanxi Art Gallery, New Works by Wenda Gu, 22-26 June, 1986

Ink Alchemy: The Experiemental Ink of Gu Wenda, Lingnan Fine Art Publishing House, Guangzhou, China 2010, p. 253

This set of works is generally in good condition. There are minor issues that are consistent with the age of the piece and the artist's working method. Please note that it was not examined under ultraviolet light. Left: There are two small holes measuring no longer than 1 cm around the lower right (close to the word). There is a ca. 4 cm tear above the artist's seal. There are wear and tear around corners. Around the centre, there is a ca. 1 cm puncture and a 3 cm tear. There is a ca. 2 cm tear at the upper centre. Centre: There are wear and tear at corners. There is a ca. 4cm puncture at the top left edge. Below the word a ca. 1cm hole and another below the seal. There are minor pinholes at the top left corner. Right: There are wear and tear at corners. There is a ca. 12 cm tear at the lower left edge. There is a Y shape tear measuring ca. 25 cm at the lower half. Another Y shape tear measuring about 8cm at the upper left edge. At the top right edge, there are three tears each measuting ca. 3cm.
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Wenda Gu
Drama of Two Culture Formats Merge C1-C3

Wenda Gu is without question one of the most prominent Chinese artists working today. He has been a regular participant in major international art events, including "China's New Art, Post-1989," "Inside Out: New Chinese Art," and the First Guangzhou Triennial. He has held solo exhibitions at premier institutions such as New York's PS1, the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art, and the National Gallery of Australia. Always a trailblazer, Gu was one of the first Chinese artists to pursue performance art and to gain international recognition for abstract ink-based art. Since the 1993, his united nations series of traveling large-scale installations, featuring hair donated by local populations and woven to represent flags and languages of different countries, have mesmerized and provoked viewers around the globe, from Sweden to Israel, Canada to Japan, Taiwan to South Africa. They also exemplify Gu's unique blend of aesthetic sensibilities, profound intellect, provocative experimentalism, and cosmopolitan vision. Wenda Gu is a rebel with a cause--and a heart. As the prominent critic Gao Minglu puts it, "we cannot interpret Gu's effort to tug at a social nerve as simply a way to create a shock effect. His objective is to understand and reinterpret the common nature and the cultural history of mankind."1

With Drama of Two Culture Formats Merge C1-C3 (Lot 912), Sotheby's is proud to take collectors back in time to the seminal and pivotal year of 1986, when the young Wenda Gu was invited to have his first solo exhibition. He had recently solidified his status as a leader of experimental ink painting through his participation in the 1985 China/Avant Garde exhibition. Soon afterwards, in 1987, he would leave leave China for an extended sojourn in the US. The issues of tradition and cultural influence that Gu addresses here would continue not only to occupy him throughout his illustrious career but also to concern and energize Chinese contemporary art as a whole. In the 1986 exhibition, the lot on offer, along with Gu's other experimental works, caused a controversy and was almost immediately closed from public view, as discussed in further detail below. Drama of Two Culture Formats Merge thus also carries immense historical significance: it is not only a precious first-hand document of China's cultural dilemmas in the mid-1980's--between progressive and conservative directions, between tradition and experimentation--but also an important early attempt by a precocious Chinese artist to expose them and tackle them head-on.

Wenda Gu was born to a cultivated family in Shanghai in 1955. His paternal grandfather was a prominent figure in Chinese theater and an early pioneer in film. Both his mother and sister were musicians with an interest also in visual art. Partly under their influence, Gu began to paint from a young age, producing propaganda and "big character" posters for a Red Guard unit during the Cultural Revolution. He then trained as a wood carver at the Shanghai School of Art and Craft, from which he graduated in 1976. But he had been more interested in ink painting all along, and after working briefly as a designer of woodcarving he enrolled in the Zhejiang Academy of Fine Arts (now China Academy of Arts) in Hangzhou to study with the renowned classical landscape painter and calligrapher Lu Yanshao. Even before receiving his Master's degree in 1981, however, the always restless Gu had again switched directions towards experimental and avant-garde art. In the early 1980's, anticipating Xu Bing's Book from the Sky, Gu began to experiment with estranging Chinese characters as well as inventing pseudo characters. Like many of his contemporaries, Gu also immersed himself in Western philosophy. As he said in a 2002 interview, "When I first faced the seal script I couldn't read it, so it became a release, because I wasn't limited by what the words said. And at that time I was intensely reading Wittgenstein's philosophy of language and Russell and it coincided. Also I had my memory of the earlier big posters from the Cultural Revolution."2

As the title Drama of Two Culture Formats Merge C1-C3 suggests, such negotiations between traditional Chinese and Western cultures are evident also in the lot on offer, which fuses Chinese and Western motifs and incorporates the medium and materials of Chinese ink painting into a contemporary installation format. The three characters at the bottom, translating roughly into "wisdom comes from tranquility," is a recurrent theme in Gu's work from the early 1980's. It is derived from a line in the Daoist classic Daodejing but also recalls Wittgenstein's famous conclusion of his Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus, "Whereof one cannot speak, thereof one must be silent." Just as importantly, Gu was and has always been concerned with maintaining his intellectual independence and critical thinking. Despite his participation in the 1985 New Wave Art Movement, he explicitly distanced himself from what he saw as its two dominant trends: collectivism and the complete embrace of the West.3 The first he considered a remnant of "mode of thinking of the Cultural Revolution or even traditional feudal society." Despite his breaking away from Chinese tradition, as an artist trained in classical Chinese painting and calligraphy he also refused to simply adopt Western modes of artistic practice. Rather, in the words of a critic, Gu wanted to "use contemporary Western art to destroy traditional Chinese art and, at the same time, use traditional Chinese art to interrogate Western contemporary thinking."4

Such resolute individuality brought Wenda Gu both attention and censure. In 1986, the Chinese Painting Academy of Shaanxi and the China Art Research Institute were planning an exhibition in Yangling, outside Xi'an, to coincide with a national symposium on Chinese painting. The organizers decided to exhibit works by a late master and Wenda Gu, who by 1985 had emerged as a leading young ink painter, together to represent "tradition" and the "avant-garde" respectively.5 Gu's experimental works (including the Drama of Two Culture Formats Merge on offer) were exhibited in its own space. In lieu of a verbal introduction, the exhibition would greet the viewer with an "open pyramid" posted with photographs of Gu's performances. For the opening of the exhibition, Gu had planned to stage a performance by sitting and light candles inside the pyramid; indeed the entire exhibition was conceived as a kind of performance stage. Gu's unorthodox gestures offended the sensibilities of some members of the Chinese Painting Academy of Shaanxi, and it probably did not help matters that Gu's introduction included such grandstanding statements as "I paint not to provide visual pleasure, but to tremble the soul." The conservative forces petitioned to have the exhibition shut down. The resulting compromise was to turn Gu's experimental show into one for "internal study" by the academy's members, although later access was given to professional painters also. As one of the dozen or so monumental banner paintings in this exhibition, Drama of Two Culture Formats Merge C1-C3 is truly an invaluable historical artifact.

The controversy in Yangling fueled curiosity and further cemented Gu's national reputation as a spokesperson for abstract and conceptual ink art. In its second 1987 issue, Fine Arts in China featured Wenda Gu in a sympathetic cover story: "Wenda Gu can be said to be the person in contemporary Chinese art who is the most destructive, the most rebellious, and the most avant-garde. He is an exceptional wanderer who has departed from the majority of Chinese artist, who has departed from the public." The journal even published Gu's two short elliptical and poetic manifestoes. In October in the same year Meishu under Gao Minglu's editorship featured an in-depth profile of Gu—the first for an avant-garde artist. For all their "destructiveness" and "rebelliousness", however, works in the 1986 exhibition were also intimate and personal. Drama of Two Culture Formats Merge C1-C3 is monumental at over 200 inches high, but painted on rice-paper mounted on silk, it would have fluttered lightly in the space. The mixture of traditional Chinese landscape elements and surrealistic imagery was not devoid of humor. The many photographs of the young and shirtless Gu lying, sitting, and walking on his unfinished works spread out on the floor may have recorded a radical artistic practice, but also registered the carefree pleasure of art-making. Of his later hair-based works, Wenda Gu said, "the advantage of using human body material [is that it's] really closing the gap between the audience and the artwork, because people face it like they would face a mirror. On many occasions people come to my work and they ask, 'Is my hair in it?'" Palpable in Drama of Two Culture Formats Merge C1-C3, these flickers of humanistic warmth may be what ultimately have made Gu Wenda's works resonant and appealing around the world.

1 Gao Minglu, "Seeking a Model of Universalism: The United Nations Series and Other Works," in Wenda Gu: Art from Middle Kingdom to Biological Millennium, ed. Mark H.C. Bessire. Cambridge, MA: The MIT Press, 2003
2 David Cateforis, "An interview with Wenda Gu," in Wenda Gu: Art from Middle Kingdom to Biological Millennium, ed. Mark H.C. Bessire. Cambridge, MA: The MIT Press, 2003
3 Wenda Gu, "My point of entry into and perspective on the 1985 New Wave Art Movement," provided by the artist
4 Refer to 3
5 Organizer Cheng Zheng's recollection, provided by the artist