谷文達 風暴

b. 1955

Pseudo Character Landscape: Wind Series, Fengbao



ink on paper, hanging scroll



titled, signed and dated 2003 in Chinese, marked with three seals of the artist

Born in Shanghai, Gu Wenda is a 1981 graduate of the Zhejiang Academy of Fine Arts in Hangzhou (now the China Academy of Arts). Gu was formally trained in traditional landscape paintings and acquired a superlative degree of technical skill, capable of producing works in the manner of pre-modern masters such as Shitao. Intellectually restless he chose to employ his facility with historical  masters’ style to create innovative compositions representing surreal spaces.  While a student in Hangzhou, Gu conceived the ‘pseudo–characters’ that became a central element of his oeuvre, including his installations as well as works in ink on paper. According to the artist, the genesis of the pseudo character can be credited to a slip of the knife while carving a seal, resulting in a false character.

During his youth as a Red Guard, Gu had witnessed the power of the written word as it directly influenced peoples' lives through that era’s prevalent 'big character posters', indeed he had written such posters himself. Years later to write such large-scale pseudo characters was a rebellious, iconoclastic act by  which he reclaimed control of the language, while simultaneously asserting the futility of trying to express oneself through the written word.

In the mid 1980’s Gu, combined his innovative landscape manner with his pseudo-characters in the much celebrated ‘Psuedo Character' series, in paintings visually striking and infused with power and mystery. Suspending an outsized pseudo character amidst a vast space above a desolate, fantastical landscape sets a hierarchy of language above nature, but the language in Gu’s paintings is elusive and it is that misunderstanding that is the essence of man's understanding of the universe.

Gu’s extraordinary imagination and resourcefulness can be seen in his past three decades of work with ink, pseudo characters, installations using hair, landscaping and landscapes. His works are in major private collections and museums worldwide and his numerous exhibitions in museums include the Ullens Center for Contemporary Art, Beijing; Asia Society, New York; the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art and the Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York.