Gu Wenda

Titleslip: signed, entitled and dated 1985, and marked with one seal of the artist
marked with one seal of the artist

Sotheby's Hong Kong, 24 October 2005, lot 729
Important Private European Collection

China, Hubei, All China Ink Painting Invitational, 1984
Shaanxi, Xi'an Artists Gallery, Wenda Gu First Solo Exhibition, 1986
Hong Kong, Hanart Gallery, 1993

Overall in good condition with a few horizontal creases present in the image and scroll mounting. At the image top right, there are two long tears measuring approximately 17 cm and 49 cm in length which were present prior to the original mounting by the artist. There are instances of mounted paper edges appearing detached from the surface scattered throughout the painting, which is inherent to the artist's intent. The scroll is fragile with minor loss of adhesion of the scroll end and mounting at the image left corner likely due to age. Overall scroll dimensions: 331 by 178 cm including scroll ends.
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"To me, illegible script is more creative, more illusionary and imaginative than normal script. I felt so free when working with illegible words. I thought, 'There must be a meaning, I just don't understand it yet'." - Gu Wenda, 2009

Gu Wenda: Political Pop in Scholarly Chinese Art

As one of the leading figures in the '85 New Wave, Gu Wenda is undoubtedly the most adventurous and ambitious pioneer of experimental ink art in China since the 1980s. Born in 1955, Gu studied traditional Chinese painting with the renowned landscape master Lu Yanshao at the Zhejiang Academy of Art, where he also taught after graduation. At the time, Gu was interested in Western philosophy, especially Ludwig Wittgenstein's theory on language, which correlated with his own  research on ancient Chinese seal script. Through his study of writing systems, Gu began his now famed series of large-scale ink paintings depicting pseudo-characters; an exploration of the illogical world of imagery  and emotion that can be illustrated but not adequately articulated through words alone.¹

The present work, titled Deconstruction of Words, is the fourth painting of the monumental five-piece Mythos of Lost Dynasties Series – Tranquillity Comes from Meditation; one of Gu's earliest pseudo-character experiments, distinguished by an integration of calligraphy, landscape, and abstract ink washes. Here, four Chinese characters – jing (tranquil), guan (observe), chaoran (transcendence)  are broken into free-floating fragments, while still maintaining the original meaning of each . Viewers, first challenged and confused by the deconstructed elements, are able to gradually reconstruct meanings with endless possibilities through re-adjusted perceptions.

With his bold and striking pseudo-character series, Gu's intensely complex visual experiments stood out among his contemporaries in the 1980s, yet he never associated himself with the collective activities and exhibitions of the '85 New Wave in China.² Rather, his solid academic background and training in traditional Chinese painting enabled Gu to seek depth and meaning in language and philosophy, and to create works which  genuinely reflected his intellectual pursuits, and differed from other artistic groups at the time. The Stars Group in Beijing, for example, in Gu's words, was more politically oriented, focusing on breaking taboos and barriers, while he was just more interested in playing with language in his own creations.³ This is perhaps why Gu, as the art critic Gao Minglu states, was  "the only independent artist during the '85 New Wave to be able to counter artistic groups and be immensely influential at the same time."⁴

¹ Maxwell K. Hearn, "Past as Present in Contemporary Chinese Art", Ink Art: Past as Present in Contemporary China, The Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York, 2013, p. 40.

² Wu Hung, "Transcending the East/West Dichotomy: A Short History of Contemporary Chinese Ink Painting", ibid., p. 22-23.

³ Jane DeBevoise, "Gu Wenda Interview Transcript", Materials of the Future: Documenting Contemporary Chinese Art from 1980-1990, Nov. 4, 2009, p. 9.

⁴ Gao Minglu, A History of Contemporary Chinese Art, 1985-1986, Shanghai People's Publishing House, October 1991, p. 207.