Gu Wenda

Wenda Gu is one of the most influential contemporary artists both within and outside China. As early as the ’85 New Wave, he was already considered an artist with an extreme “destructive power,” which manifested in his “endlessly appealing to East and West and endlessly challenging East and West at the same time,” and in his “endless self-betrayals.” The present four works from his early career—Untitled of 1982, two works of 1986 and 1986 from the Exclamatory Word and Bound Human Innards Series, and United Nations: Hong Kong Monument—embody the artistic concepts that he has always maintained.

            Born in Shanghai in 1955, Wenda Gu studied at the Shanghai School of Arts of Crafts. In 1979, he joined the first post-Cultural Revolution class of graduate students in the Chinese painting department of the Zhejiang Academy of Fine Arts, where he studied with the renowned landscape master Lu Yanshao. Lu’s deep foundation in classical literature and calligraphy impressed and moved Wenda Gu, for whom using Chinese cultural symbols in his art became second nature. However, classical Chinese culture was not Gu’s only source of inspiration. The rebel in him drove me to read and annotate extensively works of Western philosophy, literature, and poetry in his spare time; the philosophy of Nietzsche, Wittgenstein, and Russell had an immense impact on him. In 1981, Wenda Gu graduated from the Zhejiang Academy of Fine Arts and stayed there to teach. The subsequent three to four years have been characterized by Gao Minglu as Gu’s “learning-from-traditions phase.” For Gao, these traditions “include Chinese [culture] and Western modernism, and he also went through a phase of using one tradition (Western modernism to counter another.”¹ In this period, Wenda Gu was very ambitious, and his works spanned a variety of media: oil painting, ink painting, and mixed-media. As Gu himself recalls, “During a certain time, I painted many oil paintings, which I have never shown. These Impressionist and Fauvist works were my own experiments.”² These oil paintings were created mostly between 1981 and 1983, and Untitled (Lot 806) of 1982 is representative of this exploratory period. Here he paints with brilliant colours two abstract human bodies, recalling de Kooning’s abstract expressionism of the 1950’s. Gu’s assault on Chinese tradition with Western modernism was short-lived, but in these early attempts we can see the beginnings of his later, bolder experiments with media and conceptual art. For this reason, these few and rarely-seen early oil paintings are especially precious.

Although he did not intend it, Wenda Gu’s modernist experiments in the early-80’s would make him a pioneer and leader in the ’85 New Wave. Around 1985, young artists were fond of reading Western philosophy and literature, imitated Western modernism, and denigrated the Chinese tradition art as “backwards and corrupt.” Wenda Gu, by contrast, was conceptually more advanced: “I felt that purely learning from Western modernism was useful in China, but on a global scale it was still retracing the West’s footsteps. This was my second transition. I sensed that many young artists had in fact become hostages of Western modernism. So I thought change was absolutely necessary… To stimulate Chinese painting by referring to Western art as had been done earlier not only sufficed. My referential system needed to encompass the whole world.”³ At this point Wenda Gu’s methodology underwent a fundamental transformation. An “anti-mainstream consciousness” allowed him to distance himself from artistic trends and youth group movements and to maintain always an independent mind. As Gao Minglu writes, “Wenda Gu is the only independent artist in recent years to be able to counter the youth groups and be immensely influential at the same time.”⁴ Afterwards, Gu would devote himself to dissolve the binary opposition between East and West, because only when that was done could artistic media like oil painting, ink painting, and installation be freed from cultural barriers and engage in dialogue on neutral and fair ground.

Around 1983, Wenda Gu discovered the allure of Chinese characters. Difficult to decipher, seal script turned them into seemingly meaningless symbols, but this “meaninglessness” enabled an enormous space for imagination. This, along with the language philosophy of Wittgenstein and Gu’s experience of writing “big character posters” during the Cultural Revolution, motivated him to create a large number of ink installations and ink works based on characters. His solo exhibition at the Xi’an Artists Gallery in June 1986 centrally showcased his Pseudo-Character Series: “Wenda Gu’s rebellious spirit manifested itself in his rebellion against even himself. The headline characters of zheng, fan, cuo, lou, and such, written loosely with bunches of brushes, and the cinnabar-red circles and crosses infiltrate the calligraphy and painting; they are the most strongly self-rebellious elements of this exhibition.”⁵ In this exhibition, Wenda Gu’s artistic experiments had already gone very far away from two-dimensionality and begun to display characteristics of performance and installation. In September of the same year, he was invented by Varbanov Tapestry Research Center of the Zhejiang Academy of Fine Arts to create a series of works that he intended to submit to the International Biennial of Tapestry in Lausanne, Switzerland. Entitled Exclamatory Word and Bound Human Innards Series (Lot 807 and 808), this series includes such works (and exclamations) as Ha! Ha! Ha!, Ba! Ba! Ba!, Hei! Hei! Hei!, and Gu! Gu! Gu!. Wenda Gu writes these characters in black on canvases and entangle them with red abstract shapes evoking human organs. The characters all appear to be torn apart and deconstructed, making the already-nonsensical exclamations appear even more alienated from the everyday experience of language. Wenda Gu has a special fondness for characters written in black: “In black characters we feel powerful and solemn emotions and profoundly compelling structure and order.”⁶ During the Cultural Revolution, this font was often used mistakenly by people with limited education, but for Wenda Gu, it is a form of mass culture true to the spirit of Pop. For this reason he himself muddles the hei and miswrites the ba character on purpose.

In 1987, Wenda Gu moved to the United States, he began to reflect on how to break away from representational and object-based art. His solution was ultimately to use the human body as a medium. For 15 years, beginning in late 1993, he has been working consistently on the global art project United Nations. He uses hair collected from people around the world to form characters resembling calligraphy in ink, creating enormous installations dedicated to different peoples that he calls “Monuments.” Of these United Nations: Hong Kong Monument (Lot 809) is a particularly noteworthy example. First exhibited in 1997 at the Hanart TZ Gallery, it was meant by Gu to commemorate the handover of Hong Kong’s sovereignty to China. Gu used hair collected from people from Hong Kong to create seal-script characters, symbolizing the common cultural roots shared between the city and mainland China. Wenda Gu hopes to transcend narrow definitions of ethnicity with his United Nations series, which has tackled many important global issues over the past decade and a half, including racism, colonialism, and cultural hegemony.

The critic Wang Zhuan summarizes Wenda Gu’s tireless and inspiring practice of three decades thus: “Wenda Gu’s status in the history of contemporary Chinese art is cemented by two contributions: his critical, all-encompassing, and consistent artistic experimentations with his native culture and Western culture. And his critical reconstruction of Chinese culture is the origin and core content of his work.”⁷This is consistent with the artist’s own stated ideal: “A Chinese artist who only uses Chinese symbols as a marketing strategy can never gain true success and recognition. Only by encompassing the contemporary issues common to China and the West can one possibly challenge both.”⁸ From his explorations of painting of the early 1980’s, to his experiments with the written word, to his redefinition of ink art and the ink medium, Wenda Gu has proven, again and again, that an individual Chinese artist who uses cultural symbols native to China can also achieve universal relevance and resonance, and create a lasting impact on other groups of people. Such is ultimately the goal of Wenda Gu’s persistent transcendence of cultural barriers.

1 Gao Minglu, A History of Contemporary Chinese Art, 1985-1986, Shanghai People’s Publishing House, October 1991, p. 207.

2 “An Interview with Wenda Gu,” in Fei Dawei (ed.), Documents of the ’85 New Wave, Shanghai People’s Publishing House, November 2007, p. 26.

3 “An Interview with Wenda Gu,” in Fei Dawei (ed.), Documents of the ’85 New Wave, Shanghai People’s Publishing House, November 2007, p. 54.

4 See note 1.

5 Liu Xiaochun, “Brief Notes on Wenda Gu’s First Solo Exhibition,” in Zhongguo meishu bao, issue 31, 1986.

6 Wenda Gu, “Non-Narrative Words,” in Meishu sichao, Issue 6, 1986.

7 Wang Zhuan, “Wenda Gu’s Ink Alchemy,” in Rongbaozhai, October 2010.

8 Wang Zhuan, “Cultural Translation and Cultural Misreading: A Conversation between Wang Zhuan and Wenda Gu,” in Meishu yanjiu, issue 1, 2006.