Art unites nations with a hair-raising power

Be warned - your response to this piece is going to depend on your levels of disgust and/ or squeamishness. Gu Wenda is an artist who likes to dwell on aspects of the human body. He currently has an installation at the Hanart gallery which consists of human hair, and which includes a huge Union Jack made entirely from the shorn locks of British people. Beneath it, the gallery floor has been covered with rice from which mounds of Hong Kong Chinese hair rise with a certain macabre force. At last Friday's opening, guests stepped gingerly across this scene to inspect the flag. 'Don't worry!' Gu cried out helpfully. 'It's Hong Kong island!' Hair is the most accessible outlet for Gu's artistic endeavour. In 1990, he initiated a project called Oedipus Refound 1: The Enigma Of Blood which has since travelled the world whipping up outrage along the way. This is because the blood concerned is menstrual; the exhibition consisted of used tampons and sanitary napkins donated by women from 16 countries. Three years later, Gu, held an exhibition in Ohio entitled Oedipus Refound 3: Enigma Beyond Joy and Sin ; the occasion marked his first use of human placenta and placenta powder.

Well, it's different. And it's certainly a way of getting noticed - but is this the cynical point? Would Gu exhibit, say, a pile of toe clippings? 'No, no,' he says after a tiny, startled pause. 'It's not the material itself. It's the way I can elevate it - make it universal, eternal, infinite. I had the idea of the hair for a long time but I didn't do it until I could elevate it. How can you satisfy the audience if you are not satisfied yourself?' Elevation, in this context, means recognising that hair has both cultural diversity and significance. Oddly enough, Gu doesn't seem to have appreciated quite how powerful hair can be until he began his ongoing United Nations project (no relation to the other, equally contentious, UN). In 1993, he went to the History Museum in Lodz, Poland, draped the interior with white sheets from a local mental hospital and scattered it with hair from local barbershops. He says that he was not making a point about Poland in particular but how history is created by mentally ill people.

The photographs of this installation are extremely disturbing even if you're not Jewish. For the Jewish community in Lodz, which is close to several concentration camps and has the largest Jewish cemetery in the world, it was too much. (The new Holocaust Museum in Washington, after all, has a room entirely filled with shorn hair as a symbol of violent loss.) Women came and simply cried. The installation lasted 24 hours. 'I'm not upset about it, only if people ignore my work,' Gu says, shrugging. 'Any strong reaction is energy for my future work.' This was evidently true: the next United Nations installation took place in Israel in 1995. Gu attached hanks of hair to pink limestone boulders on a hill out in the desert. Naturally, there was an outcry; the Israeli parliament, the Knesset, became involved and there was a live radio debate about the legality of the project. 'I'm not insensitive to the emotions of the past,' Gu says now. 'But my project was not complete without Jewish hair.' The Israelis eventually thought so too; it is, significantly, the only one of Gu's hair installations which has a permanent site.

The ephemeral nature of some of the other hirsute projects, which have been held in Italy, New York, the Netherlands and England, doesn't seem to bother Gu. 'It's funny, the satisfaction vanishes very soon, even at the opening it's gone.' At Hanart, the Union Jack is accompanied by a hanging which bears the hair-woven words: 'Once upon a time there was a British merchant who said imagine if every Chinese wears one more inch of clothing.' 'The first part is in the past tense, the second part is in the present,' Gu explains. 'Because all corporations are rushing to the China market so that the dream of the past becomes the reality of the present.' Gu left Shanghai in 1987, when he was 32. He now lives in New York, although he spends half the year on the road, creating his art and then defending it.

Whatever you might think of his work (and it is certainly worth having a look at his challenging photographs of previous installations) he is genuinely, intensely, committed to what he does. In China, where he invented pseudo-calligraphy - beautiful, nonsense characters - as a challenge to traditional painting, his shows were closed by officials who preferred to have their art more clear-cut. He has found that there are those in the West who feel the same.

Of the tampon controversy, he says: 'Those women all sent me their personal statements, the power generated came from them. It's their point of view.' Of the use of placenta: 'For me, placenta is not a shock. In China, I had it for years as a tonic. It's kind of interesting how this same body material becomes an issue in the West, it's a kind of cultural comparison.' Then he shows a photograph of four white beds in an art gallery in Ohio, sprinkled with different powders. It is called Healthy, Aborted, Still-born, Abnormal.