Gu Wenda

marked with an artist seal, framed

Private Collection, China
CHENG XUAN, Beijing, 11 November, 2011, lot 0680

Ink Alchemy - Gu Wenda's experimental Ink Painting, Lingnan Fine Art Publishing House, Guangzhou, China, September 2010, p.193

This work is overall in good condition. There is evidence of some creases and paint missing across the surface, presumably inherent to the nature of the material. Please note that this work was not examined out of frame.
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In the early 1980s, Contemporary Chinese Ink Painting developed as the result of a number of factors including artistic reflection on the Cultural Revolution, the evolution of society towards modernity, and the challenges presented by Western culture. As part of this, anxiety regarding the modernity of culture was expressed as a rebellion against traditional Ink Painting.

Gu Wenda is one of the most iconic figures from the 1985 New Wave Movement. Well-versed in the traditional art of Ink Painting having studied Chinese landscape painting under Lu Yanshao as a graduate student, in Ink World Gu Wenda transforms the brush and ink format of traditional Ink Painting into original symbols. The work is a testament to both his spiritual connection with the Ink Painting traditions and his grand ambition to perform an "overall deconstruction" of these traditions.

 

In terms of composition, Lost Dynasty No 4, B Series (lot130) is a continuation of Northern Song Dynasty's grand and powerful landscape painting, a style with which the artist has great affinity. Nevertheless, in terms of form, Gu Wenda boldly breaks free from traditional constraints, using a dislocated and dissected form of "zhuanshu" (seal script) to compose the painting. The main body of the work is a pseudo seal script invented by the artist and the red seal in the middle is one of his earliest "pseudo Chinese character seals". According to Gu, it can be read as the "god of wine", clearly influenced by Nietzsche's "Dionysian impulse", although, as the artist also suggests, the red cross isone of the earliest forms of "intervention pop art", and may have been influenced by the "dazhibao" (literally meaning "big-character posters") of the cultural revolution. The abstract Ink Painting that fills the background is a dazzling display of the artist's skills in this traditional art form, although such "overall deconstruction" of Chinese characters and poetic images also represents a challenge to the established status quo.

 

Lost Dynasty No 4, B Series is a stunning example both of a work from the artist's "Internal Criticism" period (1983 – 1987) and of his "pseudo language" Ink Paintings which, as the artist claimed, both in concept and form, "pioneered the movement of Contemporary Chinese Conceptual Ink Painting".