Gu Wenda

Private Collection, America

Generally in good condition overall.
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As one of the most internationally acclaimed, award-winning contemporary artist from China, Gu Wenda is an important figure of the 21^st century whose works symbolize post-modern and post-colonial internationalism.  The often controversial works by Gu Wenda address complex themes of identity, language, and tradition.  Against the backdrop of Gu Wenda's life story—one that is not uncommon for many of China's cultural elite today—his works astutely articulate the challenges between cultures. Born into an affluent family in Shanghai in 1955, he participated in the socio-political Red Guard movement in the 1970s. After the end of the Cultural Revolution, he studied calligraphy and landscape painting at the prestigious China Academy of Art in Hangzhou under the tutelage of Lu Yanshao. His world view was challenged after moving to the United States in 1987. 

Given the intimate relationship between calligraphy and ink painting, it is no surprise that Gu Wenda, a landscape painter educated in the traditional discipline, is fascinated by the role language plays in individual expression. Gu's Phrase Series is a sharp critique of the semantics found in visual imagery and written language. In this painting, the Chinese characters feng for 'wind' and jing for  'scenery' are merged together in a literally illegible, but visually intelligible compound for the actual word feng-jing meaning 'landscape'. The whimsical amalgamation of the two characters is inscribed on a highly stylised ink-wash landscape that pays homage to the five tones of ink epitomised in the principles of Chinese painting. Gu Wenda creates his own artistic language in the inversion of tradition where the blatant inscription of characters are the focus of the landscape.  

His composition challenges the relationship between narration and understanding, which is analogous to his alternating relationship between the legacy of tradition and modernity. In this painting, the landscape is actually fragments of a surface filled with abstract ink wash; There is no calligraphy in the orthodox sense, only a pseudo character. Yet the viewer recognises the continuity of the Chinese calligraphy and landscape painting tradition, not because of literal depiction, but as a result of interpretation. Following in the philosophical footsteps of Homi Bhabha, Michel Foucaul and Gayatri Spivak, Gu Wenda cleverly questions the points of reference used to make sense of the world; What we see is simultaneously what we fail to see.