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GU Wenda (born 1955) is one of the first generation of Chinese artists to have graduated from the Zhejiang Academy of Fine Arts in Hangzhou (present day China Academy of Art) after schools resumed in the aftermath of the Cultural Revolution. As a seminal member of China’s early contemporary artists, he took part in building an innovative visual vocabulary that came to forge a new direction for Chinese art. After moving abroad to New York in 1987, GU Wenda’s artistic practice expanded to exploring language, race and identity politics. His current solo exhibition at 21st Century Minsheng Art Museum in Pudong traces his artistic oeuvre from his important early works to present participatory projects that engage the public. Art Historian Julie Chun will provide a brief introduction of the context in which contemporary art in China emerged and discuss the pioneering early works of GU Wenda. This will be followed by a special artist talk by GU Wenda who will lead the Royal Asiatic Society through the museum in a private guided talk of his recent works.About the artist:Although trained as an ink painter, who subsequently became world-renowned for his re-inventions of the form, GU Wenda is equally comfortable working with a few meters of xuan paper as he is working thousands of square meters of space. His creation of his own paper represented a breakthrough in the field and his practice enlarged and expanded the scale of ink painting, so that the artwork would act as a field to surround the viewing audience. GU Wenda’s large-scale installations, made with materials as diverse as human hair, tea, stone tablets and neon, explore such topics as semiotics, cultural translation and internationalism.
Born in Shanghai in 1955, GU Wenda graduated from the Shanghai Arts and Crafts School in 1976, and then earned an MA from the China Academy of the Arts in 1981 studying under the painting master Lu Yanshao. Moving to the US in the 1987, he worked as a professor at New York’s Cooper Union, sitting on boards and committees at the Art Institute of Chicago and PS1. In 2001, the National Gallery of Australia hosted his mid-career retrospective and his work has been shown subsequently at such prestigious institutions such as the Guggenheim, PS1, the Asia Society, San Francisco MoMA, Vancouver Art Gallery, National Gallery of Australia and the Contemporary Art Museum of Chile.
For more information about the artist, please visit: www.wendagu.com
