Artist making giant coloured-water painting in Shenzhen to highlight pollution

Gu Wenda is often associated with ink. But while his work is the contemporary, cosmopolitan manifestation of years of training in Chinese calligraphy and classical ink painting, it doesn’t mean he always uses ink. For example, his multi-year project United Nations used hair from hundreds of people to create words and flags to convey a desire for harmony.

On September 24, Gu is going to be in Shenzhen for another project where a Chinese landscape painting will be created without ink. This time, hundreds of schoolchildren will help him produce a 1,500-square-metre shan shui (landscape) painting using lake water turned bluish green by algae. The idea of a materially wealthy generation being robbed of a future with sufficient clean water will be driven home by two symbols on the children’s uniforms: the distorted amalgamation of “verdant mountains, emerald waters”, a four-word Chinese phrase used to describe natural beauty.

Gu is no Ai Weiwei. He is not an activist. Sitting in his elegant studio in Shanghai’s M50 art district (designed by his interior designer wife Kathryn Scott), he describes himself as a peacemaker whose main desire is to promote the unity of the human race despite our inherent differences. His is a multifaceted perspective gained from decades of living in the US and from his family, he explains.

“Like many children living through the Cultural Revolution, I made ‘big-character’ propaganda posters, which you still see traces of in my work. I witnessed the development of communism and, after 30 years living in China, I moved to America, a totally capitalistic world. I married a non-Chinese woman and we adopted a girl from China, who has grown up in New York – that’s my home when I’m not in Shanghai. She has no idea about China and we only talk to each other in English,” he says. “All these things make up who I am today.”

The fluidity of living between cultures doesn’t mean he feels any less Chinese than when he was a young man living in China. “It is a very strong identity. But being away from the country helps me examine what it means. It both dilutes and strengthens it,” he says.

It may explain his love-hate relationship with the Chinese language. His work often features large characters like those in the Cultural Revolution posters he grew up with, a reference to the totemic qualities of words, but they are mangled hieroglyphs meaning little. Making up words and tearing words apart is a practice he began in the 1980s, a time of rebellion that saw other artists such as Xu Bing developing their own pseudo languages.