Gu Wenda spins a thin but binding line around the world
As the inauguration ceremony for the CP Open Biennale on the night of Sept. 3, Gu Wenda was among about 2,000 people in attendance. The world renowned artist, a firm believer in scientific progress providing the foundations for renovating artistic expression, considered the event important enough to put Jakarta on his busy schedule.
In contrast to his usually huge installations, Gu Wenda made a relatively small one here. Yet The Thin Line is impressive in its simplicity. Expressing the magnitude of Chinese worldwide migration, the one thousand meters of black braids of human hair, lying in a thick spiral on the gold-yellow floor, evoke a sense of what it means to be part of the diaspora.
At the same time, the appearance of motion rotating outward from a fixed point of origination, and expanding and lengthening as if into infinity, recalls the repetitive rhythm of life -- and the cyclical nature of evolution.
Gu says he wanted to describe how the Chinese went everywhere, trying their luck in other countries and toiling for achievement. To express their global migration, he linked the 191 hair braids to each other with a transparent stamp, on which the word China is joined with each of the 191 countries in the world.
However, they read backwards: France and China, for instance, read as "anichecnarf", perhaps to express the delusion of exclusivism. And the equal length of the hair braids may well denote the wish of immigrants to be considered citizens of equal value and equal rights in whichever country they may choose as their new home.
New York-based Gu, or Wenda Gu as he is called in America, is himself one of the most high-profile members of the Chinese diaspora, his prominence fueled by a combination of talent and profound philosophic and far-reaching universal visions.
Hailed in contemporary art books and recognized as a key figure for cultural development by art writer Edward Lucie Smith, Gu also saw the first book on his exceptional works launched recently.
During his life, Gu Wenda has gone through various political transitions. Born in the period after the Communist Party took over and promised liberation of the people, he grew up in the Cultural Revolution and its aftermath when the people had lost faith in the promises. Then came the art revolution in the 1980s, the complete opposite of the Cultural Revolution.
A leader in the art revolution, he had to start from scratch in America. Yet Gu was confident in his abilities and he has succeeded in becoming an important figure on the international art circuit.
He studied at the Shanghai School of Art and Craft after high school at the end of the Cultural Revolution. Here no one was allowed to choose subjects for themselves, and the school decided that he would learn wood carving, even though painting was what he wanted to do. After working in a factory as a designer, he entered the China National Academy of Art in Hangzhou, a renowned center for Chinese ink painting.
He studied under the late master LuYanshao who he said was a master in scholarly painting. During that period, Gu also studied Western and Chinese philosophy as well as oil painting.
As a Red Guard, he had been assigned to paint revolutionary posters because of his skills, but in 1987 he went to the United States in the hope of more freedom in his artistic creations.
Human hair has been Gu Wenda's medium to express his belief in our common humanity, and is particularly expressed in his United Nations project which he started in 1993.
Unlike the UN, which focuses on political and social alliances among countries, Gu's project is about multiculturalism based on the spiritual exploration of a country's social and cultural history and identity. Expressing his desire to be inclusive, he simplifies an issue to take on a universal identity.
His The Thin Line is the 22nd work in this ongoing United Nations project which includes country-specific works. Over a million people have contributed their hair for Gu's monuments from Poland, Italy, the Netherlands, the United States, Israel, Sweden, Russia, Britain, Taiwan, African nations, Canada and China.
His use of hair -- a powerful symbol of identity and the soul in many societies -- has in some instances provoked public outrage. A French journalist at the recent Singapore Esplanade opening, which exhibited Gu's Man and Space, said she felt revulsion as it reminded her of the clothes woven from Jewish women's hair shorn at concentration camps in World War II.
For Gu, however, hair and other bodily extracts have a sacred meaning. He draws on age-old concepts and associates them with many myths worldwide; in China, for example, powdered hair used to be a medicine. The cluster of human hair is not a suggestion, nor everlasting reality. It is an abstract, but it can stay above time.
Pointing to the advance of science and genetic research with its potential to change human beings, Gu compares his art in bridging the traditional and the biological through his bio- experimental works, an example of which are his hair ink works.
He also uses placenta powder, long a part of Eastern societies, symbolizing the body and the spirit. When human bodily materials are reincarnated as an artwork, the significance comes from the inside of the bodily materials, he believes.
Similarly, Gu "reincarnated" tea in his work Tea Alchemy, which he made for the Asia Society's exhibition of Other Ways of Tea (2002) He used tea to produce the paper that makes the walls of the tearoom; in previous works he had used hair to make ink. Using ink made of hair is like writing with genes, he said, while imagining the immense significance it would have if he wrote with that kind of ink on paper made of tea.
Carla Bianpoen