THE CHINESE GOVERNMENT shut down Wenda Gu's first solo show almost 20 years ago. But rather than tone down the provocative content of his work, the visual and performance artist has been upping the creative ante ever since.
Gu has used ink, paper, tea, stone, powdered placentas, menstrual blood and, most famously, hair in his work. He is experimenting with a semen series. The menstrual blood and placentas caused controversy in the US, but Gu also created a furore in China with his ink drawings, illustrating the importance of the interplay between cultural context and art in his work.
'It's kind of a test between Chinese culture and the west,' says Gu, a 49-year-old from Shanghai who now lives in Brooklyn, New York. 'China has a long history of eating placenta as tonic medicine - there's no controversy. When you bring this material to the west, audiences impose so many different issues onto it.'
Despite their unusual materials and large size, Gu's art has found an increasingly broad audience, even in China, which he left for the US in 1987. He joined dozens of avant-garde mainland artists who emigrated at about the time of the Tiananmen Square crackdown and created a contemporary Chinese art movement. Gu is one of the best known of the movement's artists, along with such well-known names as Cai Guoqiang, Chen Zhen, Huang Yongping and Xu Bing.
In 2001, Gu had his first survey exhibition at the National Gallery of Australia, in Canberra, a sign of acceptance by the mainstream art world. 'Wenda has gone beyond being a diaspora Chinese artist and really made a place for himself in a very difficult contemporary art scene,' says Robyn Maxwell, the gallery's senior curator of Asian art. 'We think he's one of the important artists of the late-20th and early-21st centuries. The interest is in his themes, the way he's able to transcend those national boundaries and offer a way of creating art that's truly international.'
An exhibition of several of Gu's major works, including United Nations: United 7561 Kilometres, a tent-like structure composed of a single braid of hair that would stretch to 5km if flat and 7,561km if made to form a single strand, is touring to four university museums in the US. Accompanying the exhibition is a recently released book with the same title, Wenda Gu: Art from Middle Kingdom to Biological Millennium, which tracks Gu's progress from sinocentric work to an obsession with biological materials and genetic engineering. In mid-2005, the exhibition will move to the Contemporary Art Centre of Macau and then Shenzhen's He Xiangning Art Museum. Gu is working on another hair piece that will be part of a group show on the Great Wall, to be held at Beijing's Millennium Dome, at about the same time. The work will require four tonnes of hair (obtained from a hair-recycling plant near Shanghai) and will represent a section of the wall, built from hair bricks.