Gu Wenda 2009-11-04
Brooklyn,
New York
"[T]he vanguards of the ’85 movement were vanguards from the Western front, not the Chinese front. I don’t know if it’s good or bad, but without Nietzsche, without the great Western thinkers who looked at Asian things, I probably just wouldn’t have looked into Chinese tradition and philosophy at all. They looked at it in a specific way and we followed in their steps."
Biography:
Gu Wenda (b. 1955, Shanghai) is an artist and currently resides in Brooklyn, New York. He also maintains studio practices in Shanghai and Xi’an.
In 1976, Gu graduated from the Shanghai School of Arts and Crafts, and in 1981, from the Zhejiang Academy of Fine Arts, Hangzhou (now the China Academy of Art), where he studied traditional Chinese landscape painting under Lu Yanshao. Gu moved to the United States in 1987 and has been a frequent exhibitor in international exhibitions and biennials in China, Japan, Australia, South Africa, Italy, Poland and the United States, among others.
In his early career, Gu was known for his experimentations in installation and performance art and for his creative subversion of China’s millennia-old traditions of calligraphy and ink painting. Later on, Gu gained a reputation for his large-scale projects, and in particular, his use of human hair in installations such as his multi-year United Nations Project. Since 2005, Gu has focused on public, site-specific art and has recently displayed installations such as Heavenly Lanterns: Tea Palace in Brussels, and China Park in Shanghai.
