Featured artist Wenda Gu
Wenda Gu, United Nations: Man & Space Year 2000
Artist Biography
Wenda Gu was born in Shanghai, China in 1955 and graduated from Shanghai School of Arts in 1976. In 1981 he received his M.F.A. from China Academy of Arts where he studied under the classical landscape painting master Lu Yanshao and where he taught from 1981 to 1987.
Wenda Gu moved to the USA in 1987. He was an associate professor of Studio Art at the University of Minnesota from 1989 to 1990. He has been invited to lecture at various art academies, universities and institutions worldwide including Cooper Union in New York.
Since 1981, Wenda Gu has participated in numerous international solo and group exhibitions and biennales in countries and regions such as China, Hong Kong, Taiwan, Singapore, Japan, Korea, indonesia, Malaysia, Israel, Australia, Germany, Norway, France, Russia, The Netherlands, Italy, Britain, Mexico, Switzerland, Sweden, South Africa, Poland, Brazil, Canada, Turkey and the United States.
Gu is a co-author of Chinese Ink Painting in the Twenty-First Century published by Shanghai Fine Arts in China. His art has been included in numerous recent art history books including† Janet Marquardt & Stephen Eskilson, Frames of Reference - Art, History, and the World (Mc Graw Hill & Laurence King Publishing Ltd. London, 2004).
He has received many awards including the Canada Council for Visiting Foreign Artists 1987; His book, Wenda Gu - Art From Middle Kingdom to Biological Millennium, published and distributed by MIT Press won two awards in 2004: second place of The American Museum Association and the publications design award of The New England Museum Association. He has been selected as one of ten of Chinaís most influential visual artists of the twentieth century by the Committee of the Forum of Centennial Art of China.
He has been featured in television and radio programs worldwide such as: BBC in Britain, PBS in America, CCAC in China, Second National Television
Station in Germany, ABC in Australia, National Television and Radio
Station in South Africa, Israel, Sweden, Japan, Vancouver, Hong
Kong, Taiwan, Brazil, France, etc.
Under Wenda Guís† fifteen-year ongoing global art project entitled United Nations ñ his most conceptually, methodologically, geographically, culturally, ethnically, and politically as well as artistically most inclusive and complex project -- he has completed 21 national monuments. Edward Lucie-Smith explained Wenda Guís United Nations project in his new book Visual Arts In the Twentieth Century, ìIn one sense, Wenda Guís project, with its all-embracing ambition, relates to European romanticism - to ideas inherited by the modernists from the culture of the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries. In another sense, it is linked, as he himself points out, to ëgrowing self-awareness of regionalism and otherness.í
Besides his United Nations art project, at the same time in 1993, Gu also began to plan another 10-year project which he calls Forest of Stone Steles -
Retranslation & Rewriting Tang Poetry. This project consists of 50 stone steles to be carved with his own contemporary version of ìTang poemsî resulting from a literal translation of Tang poems from Chinese to English, then a translation by sound of the Tang poems from English back to Chinese.
From 1999 to 2001, Gu created many other art projects. Ink Alchemy is a project originating from the famous Shanghai Cao Sugong Ink Factory. It utilizes a genetic product made of powdered Chinese hair used as an installation as well as for ink painting. Tea Alchemy is being created in a rice paper factory in Jing county of Anhui province in China where traditional rice paper has been produced for more than a thousand years. Tea Alchemy uses green tea and traditional rice paper making methods to create green tea paper. Those national treasures of China are given a completely new meaning and life.
Wenda Gu has participated in hundreds of critically acclaimed national and international exhibitions. Perhaps Guís most acclaimed and controversial work is United Nations, an on-going series of works begun in 1993. One of the works of this series, United Nations: Man & Space Year 2000, a colossal, 100-ft high installation made of human hair and representing the flags of all nations, will be the center piece of the INK not INK exhibition.