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Ad Code: 3
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from Auction House Records.
United Nations-Hong Kong Monument: The Historical Clash (3)
Artwork images are copyright of the artist or assignee
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This biography from the Archives of AskART:
|  Known as the "hair artist," Wenda Gu has that association because human hair is his signature material in his installation sculpture and because of his trademark hairstyle that is a shaved crown and a thick black mane that hangs below his waist. In fact, hair is the fiber weaving together his ambitious series "United Nations--an Ongoing Global Art Project for the 21st Century," begun in 1993.
Gu is credited as being the father of conceptual Chinese ink painting, a genre that remained static for centuries. What he did was to use these stylized characters loaded with symbolism as a referent but create his own characters full of intriguing design but devoid of meaning.
He was born in Shanghai, China and is one of the many emerging Asian artists working in the United States. In China, his parents were both punished during the Cultural Revolution for their work in theater and film, and he was taught the classics at home by his paternal grandfather. He graduated from the Shanghai School of Arts and Crafts in 1979 and earned a master's degree in traditional ink painting from the China National Academy of Fine Arts in 1981.
He continues to maintain a studio in Shanghai as well as one in New York, where he moved in 1987 and has eight part-time assistants. He is married to Kathryn Scott, artist and interior designer, and they live in Brooklyn Heights.
In China, he began as a painter, combining an ancient art form with new Western, modernist concepts. Today his purpose according to a recent article, is to explore "the political and social esthetic of what he calls 'body waste' materials, including menstrual blood, semen, and placenta, in addition to hair" (ARTnews, 9/2000). One of his installations, "United Nations--Temple of Exoticism," is a lacy tent of hair and furnished with Ming and Louis XV style furniture.
He is represented in numerous collections including the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art where he created a huge site-specific work titled "United Nations--Babel of the Millennium." |
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