Wenda Gu is a leading Chinese artist living in New York. In China, he was active in the avant-garde movement of the 1980s and showed his work in the seminal exhibition of this period China Avant-Garde(1989) at the China Art Gallery. Gu migrated from Shanghai to the United States in 1987 and has since shown his work in solo exhibitions at the Asian Art Museum, San Francisco (1999), San Francisco Museum of Modern Art (1999), Hong Kong Museum of Art, Hong Kong (2000), Utsonomiya Museum of Art, Japan (2000) and Queens Museum of Art, New York (2001). One of his most recent installations will be staged at the Asia Society and Museum in the exhibition The New Way of Tea, an exhibition that explores the Japanese tea ceremony (chanoyu) from a contemporary perspective. The following interview with Gu explores some of his ideas surrounding this new work, taking into account his background and philosophy towards calligraphy, one of the key features of his work.

Melissa Chiu: Let's start with a brief discussion of your background. Most people know that you are a Chinese artist who has settled in the United States. You first migrated to San Francisco and then to New York. Can you describe the conditions under which you came to America?
Wenda Gu: I only stayed in San Francisco for one week initially. I received a national grant for visiting artists from York University in Toronto for three months; then I went back to San Francisco for three months and then to New York. When I arrived in New York I almost completely quit making art because most of my time was spent studying English. I was looking around trying to absorb my new surroundings. I didn't create any art work for an entire year, but I was fortunate because I did not have to work at any job. A lot of immigrants who are artists have to find a job to survive. Sometimes I gave lectures during this time. I also spent more than half a year as a visiting studio artist at the University of Minnesota. This was the only kind of work I had at that time.

MC: What kind of art training did you receive in Shanghai? You trained in calligraphy didn't you?
WG: You could say that I have had two forms of training. The first was my study at the Shanghai School of Art and Craft just after high school at the end of the Cultural Revolution. I was lucky enough to get into a school rather than having to go to the countryside, but I wasn't allowed to choose my major. In fact, no one was allowed to choose for themselves. The school decided that I would learn wood carving. I was always rebellious. I refused to learn from tradition and I disliked wood carving. At school I was treated as a troublesome student who didn't want to do a profession but wanted to paint. I painted my own compositions. Looking back now, I was really young and didn't have a clear view of what I wanted to do, except that I knew I didn't want to repeat the old masters. I did some landscape paintings using ink on rice paper with some colour. Later, I didn't use any colour at all. These paintings were totally black grey and white.

MC: The art classes and the training you received in Shanghai seemed vocational rather than academic. The distinction between artisan and artist perhaps.
WG: That's why they criticised me because I wanted to be a fine artist, not a designer.

MC: But you did have some formal training in painting. You went to the art school in Hangzhou didn't you?
WG: Yes after the Shanghai Art School I went to work in a wood carving factory for three years as a designer and then I went to the China National Academy of Art in Hangzhou, which is known as a good school for Chinese ink painting. I was lucky enough to get out of the factory and go to a graduate program. It was the first time that the schools had opened after the Cultural Revolution and I was fortunate enough to be accepted since they only selected five students nationwide. I studied under the master Lu Yanshao who died only five years ago. He was a master in scholarly painting. He could write well, do calligraphy well, and was considered the person to carry on the scholarly tradition. During this period I was studying Western and Chinese philosophy as well as oil painting, experimenting with expressionism, surrealism and other Western styles.

MC: You were able to experiment in this way at art school?
WG: Yes, but this was just private. We weren't allowed to show these works in public. In the classroom we would do traditional and modern ink paintings. Now looking back I really appreciate this traditional training. It helped me a lot. Without this traditional base you don't really have a something to work against. At the time, I just wanted to break the tradition, but it was very good for me. If you look at a lot of contemporary Chinese artists now, very few of them come from a traditional training; most of them are trained in oil paining or sculpture.

MC: Writing and calligraphy do seem to underpin a large number of your works. For example, pseudo-seal script in Pseudo-Characters Series: Contemplation (1984), writing screens in the United Nations series such as United Nations- China Monument: Temple of Heaven (1998) or most recently Forest of Stone Steles-Retranslation and Rewriting of Tang Poetry (1993-2001) which all employ calligraphic elements. Yet your calligraphy has never been a true representation of language with its distortion, combination with other texts and mistranslation into English. Many other Chinese artists such as Qui Zhi Jie, Song Dong and Xu Bing have utilised calligraphy in their work in different ways. What is your attitude to writing in the context of your art work and can you talk about why it is such a significant feature of your work?
WG: My work is concerned with Chinese calligraphy or Chinese words. This interest began in 1982. The first seal I carved consisted of two fake characters. At this time, I was studying the language of philosophy from Russell and Wittgenstein. This coincided with my study of seal script. Seal script is an ancient form of writing that isn't used today; you can't understand it at all. So I thought of the seal script as a fake language. I became really interested in Wittgenstein's theory of the mystery of the universe that cannot be described by language. The other influential factor was the Cultural Revolution, when I was a red guard and painted slogans because I had painting skills. I still believe that modern calligraphy was produced during the Cultural Revolution after the Communist Party.

MC: This idea of a new form of calligraphy developed through the "big character posters", can you elaborate?
WG: During the Cultural Revolution there was a change in people's attitude to language. People passionately believed in Marxism. The "big character posters" were made by young people, workers and farmers; none of whom had any formal training in calligraphy. They would just do this writing. I consider this writing much more lively, vital and contemporary than calligraphy by the masters. Today just to repeat the old techniques, even if you are solidly trained, is an historical repetition. The farmers and
workers involved in the Revolution did not consider what they were doing as art work but if you look back, their words had their own identity and creativity. Chinese calligraphy is in decline because it just repeats the work of old masters. Even though the format might be more refined and complete it is just repeating from history. The "big character posters" are really the new form of Chinese words. These works were about passion too, the people believed in what they were writing.

MC: So for your installation in The New Way of Tea exhibition you have created a new character.
WG: Actually it is not entirely new. The new project that I am working on at the moment- that began with the stone carving works (Forest of Stone Steles-Retranslation and Rewriting of Tang Poetry)-is to create a new Chinese phrase. In Chinese you need two to four characters to make a phrase but I am trying to combine two characters into one character to make a phrase.

MC: So what is the phrase that you have combined for The New Way of Tea?
WG: I have called this project Tea Alchemy. The two characters are tea (cha) and alchemy (shu). I combined both characters so that there is meaning from the one character. This character will be featured in the work in a watermark imprinted eight times on each sheet of rice paper in the installation. To create this effect the factory in China embroidered the outline of the character onto the bamboo sheet used to catch the fibres so that when the paper is made, the character is embedded into the paper. I discovered Chinese calligraphy and words from 1982 to 1985 when I created a series of fake characters, but after this I abandoned it because I disbelieved in language so I excluded language in my work entirely. I started to explore materials.

MC: This is true. After you moved to the United States, your works began to incorporate materials from the human body such as menstrual blood in Oedipus Refound #1: The Enigma of Blood (1992), the use of placenta in Oedipus Refound #2: The Enigma of Birth and Oedipus Refound # 3: Enigma Beyond Joy and Sin and hair in United Nations-American Monument:Post-Cmoellotniinaglpiiostm (1995) and United Nations-Israeli Monument: the Jews(1995). But what about the symbolic value of these materials you use? Do they have a personal symbolism?
WG: When I started to use materials from the human body I thought of the body as the centre of the universe-the most essential material. The body also referred to art history, and I believed that when the human body was represented, art becomes subjective. When I exhibited The Enigma of Blood, for example, I was not aware of a lot of the issues being discussed around my work. I was still raw here in America. When I finished the work, a professor from Minnesota told me about the controversy surrounding Mapplethorpe's photographs and the National Endowment for the Arts. I wasn't aware of the reaction that Christians, Catholics or other religious groups would have. I found out gradually, because this was something of a Western reaction to the work.

MC: Was it a case of your Chinese background coming to the fore in these works? In many ways you were still coming to terms with anther culture and another system from China to the West.
WG: I was not satisfied with my creation until I found the subject matter for United Nations. For immigrants there seem to be three cultural choices, you can retain your cultural traditions, abandon or rebel against them.

MC: So which would you say you have chosen?
WG: I tried to find the most inclusive subject, to include all cultures in my work. That is why I was happy when I started United Nations because it avoided the stereotype of what kind of work Chinese artists should do. United Nations covers everything, it is difficult to identify which culture it comes from because it is international or universal. Nearly a million people have donated their hair to these works from across the world.

MC: What was your initial attraction to hair?
WG: I was attracted to hair partly because of its archival qualities and of course, it is easy to collect. Hair lasts forever. When you see the Egyptian mummies their hair is still in tact after thousands of years. Hair is also associated with so many historical myths from different cultures. I began to use hair first in 1989. It felt right to use hair, especially now that people call this new millennium; the biological millennium. This is the era where science predominates and genetic research is the main focus. It is the most dangerous and exciting field of research-with its potential to change a human being. This is what religious radical groups seem to hate the most. This new millennium calls for something different. For example, my hair ink. It works exactly like a traditional form of ink stick but it is made from hair. In this way I try to bridge the traditional and the biological.

MC: To combine the body with a traditional form. It's making a clear statement also about tradition and the inescapability of one's cultural background-an indication of how much culture is linked to one's sense of being and physicality.
WG: There are so many Chinese artists doing ink paintings. No one can escape from tradition. If you escape from it you end up doing expressionism or surrealism. It is a predicament. This is why I started to re-do ink painting. When I paint with hair ink I am painting with human genes. This is different from normal ink painting. I always try to get away from convention, but this is not always easy. You have to be brave to also accept that the reality is commercial. If I were in China I don't think I could have started the United Nations project.

MC: Both overseas Chinese artists Xu Bing and the late Chen Zhen have spoken of their generation, to which you belong, as experiencing three decades of major life changes: the first decade of the Cultural Revolution in China, the second decade of the art revolution in the 1980s in China, and the third living in the West. Would you identify with this explanation of experiences?
WG: There are too many changes to speak about it in this way. You have to be really flexible. I was born in a period after the Communist Party took over; when people believed in the Liberation. As a child I grew up in the Cultural Revolution and the post Cultural Revolution, when people lost their belief. And then when China's doors opened, the 1980s art revolution occurred, which was the complete opposite of the Cultural Revolution. I felt that I was always lost, and then I was an immigrant to America, throwing myself into an unknown world, although I had read about the West in art books and magazines. The first time I left China was the first time I took an aeroplane. In China I was a leader in the art revolution but when I came here to the United States I had to start from zero. In these thirty years, so much has happened. When I am old I can write a colourful biography. Yet this is the pattern of my generation. What is the fourth decade? One can't predict. Maybe it is the way back to China. I don't know. When I talk about my work I always draw a cross as representing four extremes; Marxist ideology and capitalist reality, on the one side, and Chineseness and internationalism on the other side. These concepts are so complicated yet so simple. In this postcolonial, postmodern international world today an artist cannot make it if he has only have one form of knowledge. In the information era, you have to employ different forms of knowledge. In the 1980s you had more distinctive art movements in say, America or Europe. Now you see more and more integration and mixing so that you can't necessarily identify artists according to where they are from.

MC: I think that the recent proliferation of international biennales has contributed to this. There has developed what could be called a circuit where a select group of artists and curators travel from one site to another. This has perhaps also promoted notions of internationalism in art.
WG: In the past, biennales used to show different cultures but weren't interested in social awareness, but I think that this has been changing. People say that I am a Chinese artist but the Chinese artists say that I am American. Perhaps the traditional sense of what is considered to be Western has changed. I belong to a third group of artists.

MC: It is interesting that you should use this term. Chinese critics such as Gao Minglu and Hou Hanru have spoken of a "third space" as an explanatory model for the place of Chinese artists in the international scene. This notion of a "third space" is derived from Homi Bhabha's postcolonial theoretical notion of a third space. Is this what you are referring to ?
WG: Yes, in part. A university once arranged a discussion between Homi Bhabha and me. But I would say that this aspect of Bhabha's theories is now not so relevant. What I want to do is more inclusive-to not only speak about identity or racial politics. I want my work to be inclusive. I want it to appeal to a broad group rather than one race. To be inclusive and simplify an issue can make a universal identity. This depends on the circumstances and political shifts. The mainstream is dominated by the powerful. I believe in Darwinism, the strongest is represented and it is essentially survival of the fittest.

MC: This notion of the "third space" is a theoretical approach, what about the tearoom you will create for The New Way of Tea exhibition?
WG: The way that I have been thinking about Tea Alchemy is as a series. The first work in the series will be at the Asia Society but I will continue with my research of the history of tea. A tearoom can symbolise the Chinese socialist period which was less efficient, and when drinking tea became an essential aspect of one's job. Hot tea is also symbolic of past hardships in China. In some places where there was no heating people would warm themselves by holding hot cups of tea. The second project in the series will probably focus on the identity of tea in different cultures and different periods. I am more interested in tea as a culture. In the work Tea Alchemy (2002) I used tea to produce the paper that makes the walls of the tearoom while in previous works I used hair to make ink. Imagine if one were to paint in this ink on the tea paper. I think such a project is a completely new idea. It is not about the visual form but the identity of the material.

MC: And what about this idea of transformation, which is inherent in the use of the word "alchemy"? In your installation, there is the material transformation of the tea into paper, and the physical transformation with green tea powder falling to the ground forming a mound that accumulates with each successive day inside the tearoom. What kind of transformation did you want to describe in your work?
WG: One could also call this a reincarnation of traditions. I think this work attempts to reveal the mystery of the tradition. I thought about many words until I found this word, "alchemy". Tea is drunk by many cultures including the Chinese, Japanese, English and Russians. Tea has become a symbol of healthy life today. It is a valuable thing, just as gold is the final product in the process of alchemy.

MC: In terms of your practice, one could say that this diversification has characterised your entire body of work. There is a clear sense of evolution and development in your installations. This can be illustrated by the evolution of calligraphy in your work which went from paintings developed from the "big character posters", ink painting with distorted characters, pseudo seal script, combinations of Chinese with other languages in some I works, re-writing Tang poetry in Forest of Stone Steles.
WG: In the 1980s you had more distinguished art movements in say, America and Europe. Now you can see more and more integration and mixing so that you can't neccessarily identify artists according to where they are from.

MC: I think that the recent proliferation of international biennales have contributed to this. There has developed what could be called a circuit where a select herd of artists and curators travel from one site to another. This has perhaps also promoted notions of internationalism.
WG: I think in the past biennales used to show different cultures but weren't interested in social awareness, but I think that this has changed. People say that I am a Chinese artist but the Chinese artists say that I am American. Perhaps the traditional sense of what it is to be Western has changed. I belong to a third group of artists. The force for a new form of art.

MC: You have already spent over a decade in the West. What are the conventions that you have to work with as an artist, as opposed to working in China.
WG: There are many different comparisons. But one does come to mind. The art work that you have to do in China for the government, for example, when you don't want to do the propaganda you choose to do art for arts sake. There was no art market in China to speak of. I didn't want to do propaganda work in China so I made other sorts of work and didn't even think about selling it. The big shift for me to come here to the United States to survive, especially after the 1980s generation here, you have to capitalise on your work and make your work into a commodity. The other thing about New York is the diversity of cultures. Although there is still racism and barriers exist. you can still see the world. In China you couldn't see that, you saw the world from books.

MC: So you had support from the university system and from scholars?
WG: I think that I had support from collectors. A collector actually sponsored me to come to the United States. Unfortunately he died only three weeks ago. He was the Dean of the Medical School at Utah University. He was a Chinese contemporary art lover.

MC: How did he first come into contact with your work?
WG: He went to China as a tourist initially. When he began to collect, he met a well known art historian at Berkeley called Peter Selz who he asked which artists he should collect. At that time Selz was on a lecture tour throughout China and recommended a visit to my studio. I met with this collector and Selz in 1986 and then a year later when I wanted to leave China I asked the collector to help me. He did, and he collected some of my works as well. I was fortunate also because my ex-wife left for China one year beforehand and set up a base in the United States. That's the story.

MC: What do you think you learned from him?
WG: When I look back, I know that I was really rebellious. On the one hand, I learned traditional painting skills where you would copy paintings from one dynasty to another. On the other hand, I spent a lot of time reading both Chinese and Western philosophy. Two years of my graduate period, from 1979-1981, I spent time reading about aesthetics, literature and philosophy.

MC: Were most of the translations of Western texts coming from Hong Kong at this time?
WG: No not really. All the texts I was reading had been translated into Chinese in China. These ranged from the ancient Greeks to the contemporary, but the contemporary texts were translated with a preface explaining why they were translated, which was an attempt to discredit them. The ancient texts from the West and the East were not criticised, and neither were other texts important to the Communist Party, for example, Marxism was left alone. Modern philosophy was all criticised, but their translations existed.

MC: You haven't mentioned calligraphy as part of this training, when so much of your work is based around notions of writing and the tradition of calligraphy in China.
WG: I did calligraphy myself even though my major was landscape. To do scholarly painting you have to learn Chinese literature and calligraphy in order to do the inscription in the painting, which is regarded as an important feature of the painting. So sometimes I would write poems, both classical and contemporary. I wrote two volumes, but they were never published. They were too radical. I also wrote a kind of novel; a kind of autobiography.

MC: So would you describe the "big character posters" as the greatest influence over your work and your use of text?
WG: Yes it is the calligraphy of the time, rather than a blind following of tradition.

MC: It is interesting that characters have returned in your work then.
WG: I left language completely for materials. I believe that materials are the most essential thing in the universe, not secondary or artificial in any way. The most essential material is not any material, but the human body. This was when I started to do the United Nations works, when I started to use the human body in the form of hair to write language. This is different from writing with ink or printing. It is using human nature to form artificial nature; nature and artificial nature become one.

MC: What was your reaction to the realisation that your work had engaged with what could be called a taboo?
WG: People had the controversy in their mind. Western people have preconceptions of their society. I didn't have the same preconceptions because I am an immigrant to this country. Chinese people traditionally eat placenta. If I did a work with placenta in China it would not be a big deal. I first showed a work using placenta at the Museum of Modern Art in Oxford. It was controversial at the time. As the second project in the series, I had a knowledge that it would be controversial that it why I chose placenta from a healthy, aborted, still-born and handicapped birth. The fascinating thing for me was that in China people eat placenta as a tonic but in the West, the same material is controversial. This is all about knowledge manipulation.

MC: So you were in effect, practicing two art forms, wood carving by day and landscape painting by night.
WG: I didn't really treat wood carving as my profession. I rarely attended my classes and was always hiding in my bedroom painting in ink until the teacher would come and find me. I would really be in trouble then. Because I didn't want to do painting instead of wood carving they criticised me as wanting to be famous-to be an individual rather than a worker at the factory. I had three years of training at the Shanghai Art School. After that my class was sent to a wood carving factory in Shanghai to work. I was lucky. Out of my twenty classmates I was the one chosen to be a designer so I had a lot of time to do my own work. The wood carving was folk designs carved in relief on furniture; a craft well known in southern China ? province Zhejiang?? I had spare time, it wasn't like I was in the factory and had to work eight hours a day. I was pretty free and could do my own thing.

MC: Interestingly, this seems like your own form of simplification, in the same vein but with obvious differences, as simplified characters that were adopted when the Communists came to power in order to make the language easier for people to learn?
WG: When the communists took over China in 1949 they created simplified characters. But this change to language never simplified phrases, because there has never been one character for a phrase. This has never existed in Chinese literature or language. This idea is completely new. But I use simplified characters to form one character, continuing the classical aesthetics of language. Together these characters become one and become more complex.

This interview was recorded January 4th, 2002 in New York.   

Melissa Chiu is Curator of Contemporary Asian and Asian American Art at the Asia Society and Museum in New York. She was Founding Director of the Asia-Australia Arts Centre in Sydney, Australia and has published widely on Asian contemporary art in journals and magazines such as art Asia Pacific Magazine, Third Text and Art and Australia. She has curated exhibitions of artists from Hawaii, Malaysia, China, India, Thailand, Singapore and Vietnam.