(650) 656-9132
qca_info@qualiagallery.com www.qualiagallery.com
GU WENDA 谷文达
b. 1955 in Shanghai; lives and works between New York and Shanghai
Gu Wenda was born in Shanghai in 1955. In 1981, he received his M.F.A. from the China Academy of Art, where he also taught traditional Chinese painting from 1981 to 1987. That same year, he was awarded a Canada Council grant for visiting foreign artists and relocated to the United States.
In 1999, Art in America featured Gu Wenda’s monumental project United Nations on its March cover, making him the first Chinese artist to receive this distinction. In 2015, he was honored with the Lifetime Achievement Award for Asian Contemporary Art at the Prudential Eye Awards in Singapore.
In Contemporary Chinese Art History (1985–1986), Gao Minglu wrote, “In the ‘85 New Wave Movement, Gu Wenda was the only individual artist who was capable of contending with the many groups.”
Art historians Marilyn Stokstad and David Cateforis described Gu’s work in their widely used textbook Art History:
“In its ambitious attempt to address in artistic terms the issue of globalism that dominates discussions of contemporary economics, society, and culture, Gu’s work is remarkably timely. Yet, like all important art, it is meant to speak not only to the present but also to the future, which will recognize it as part of the fundamental quest of artists throughout history to extend the boundaries of human perception, feeling, and thought and to express humanity’s deepest wishes and most powerful dreams.
A ‘great utopia of the unification of mankind probably can never exist in our reality,’ admits Gu, ‘but it is going to be fully realized in the art world.’”
Reflecting on the art revival of 1985, Gu Wenda wrote in his Artwholism Philosophical Manuscript:
“It showed the urgent situation of ‘the wind sweeping through the tower heralds a rising storm in the mountains and the city might crumble under the mass of dark clouds.’ (Tang poetry) Traditional painting was dead, and so was art. From what I saw, it was a historical opportunity—what is called the phoenix’s nirvana, rebirth through fire.”
BIOGRAPHY
GU WENDA 谷文达
b. 1955 in Shanghai; lives and works between New York and Shanghai
Art critic Huang Zhuan observed:
“Gu Wenda’s status in contemporary Chinese art history is grounded in two key achievements within China: his comprehensive critique of both native linguistic culture and Western influence, and his persistent artistic experimentation. His critical reconstruction of native Chinese culture serves as both the starting point and the core of his practice. Among his many art projects, the Ink series represents the most sustained, expansive, and in-depth experimental effort. It forms the foundation of our study of his work within both intellectual and art historical contexts and is intertextually linked with his two other major projects: United Nations and Forest of Stone Steles: A Retranslation and Rewriting of Tang Poetry.”
Huang further notes that as a pioneer of contemporary experimental ink painting, Gu’s conceptual framework centers on three thematic subjects: character-images, cultural language, and biological materials. His practice intersects with philosophy, cultural studies, linguistics, biology, and art history, forming a wide-reaching interdisciplinary approach.
In a 1996 review for The New York Times, chief art critic Roberta Smith remarked:
“Wenda Gu… seems to be joining the list of artists whose work is attacked by a larger public questioning its status as art and defended by fervent art worlders who ignore its obvious weakness in the face of any opposition.”
British art historian Edward Lucie-Smith wrote in Visual Arts in the Twentieth Century:
“In one sense, Wenda Gu’s 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 growing self-awareness of regionalism and otherness.’ It thus typifies the tensions and deep divisions to be found in the most characteristic artistic expressions of the early 1990s.”
He continued in a 2002 exhibition catalogue:
“Wenda Gu is the most celebrated of a new generation of avant-garde artists who emerged from China in the very late 1980s and in the 1990s, as a result of the ‘open door’ policy that succeeded the chauvinism of the Cultural Revolution. He has made himself into a fully international figure. In more senses than one, he is a key figure in the culture of our time.”
【望廬山瀑布】簡體詞系列
Watching the Lushan Waterfall, Simplified Chinese series, 2024 Ink on Xuan Paper
48.5 x 180 x 2 cm | 19 x 70.75 in