The Crisis of Calligraphy and the New Way of Tea:
An Interview with Wenda Gu

By Melissa Chiu

Mythos of Lost Dynasties By Wenda Gu (b. 1955), 1983-87 Form #c: pseudo-seal script in calligraphic copybook format; ink on rice paper, seals An installation view, China National Academy of Art, Hangzhou Height 38 cm, width 26 cm (each sheet) Collections of the British Museum, Johnson Chang, Jane Debevoise, Ethan Cohen and Howard Farber

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), Utsunomiya 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 New Way of Tea', an exhibition that explores the Japanese tea ceremony (chanoyu) from a contemporary perspective. In the following interview, Melissa Chiu, Curator of Contemporary Asian and Asian American Art at the Asia Society and Museum, explores some of Gu's 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 arrived in San Francisco first, and went on 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; 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 artwork for an entire year, but I was fortunate because I did not have to work at any job. A lot of immigrant artists have to find a job to survive. Sometimes I gave lectures. 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 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 being sent 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 should learn woodcarving. I was always rebellious. I refused to learn from tradition and I disliked it. At school I was treated as a troublesome student who didn't want 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, 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 criticized me - because I wanted to be a fine artist, not a designer.

MC: But you did have some formal training in painting. You eventually attended the art school in Hangzhou didn't you?

WG: Yes, after the Shanghai art school I worked in a woodcarving 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. Schools were reopening for the first time after the Cultural Revolution and I was fortunate enough to be accepted since they only selected five students nationwide. I studied under Lu Yanshao who died just five years ago. He was a master in scholarly painting, a good writer and calligrapher and was considered the person to carry on the literati 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 in 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 base you don't really have anything to work against. At the time, I just wanted to break with tradition, but it was very good for me. If you look at a lot of contemporary Chinese artists, very few of them have received traditional training; most of them are trained in oil painting or sculpture.

MC: Writing and calligraphy 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) all employ calligraphic elements. Yet your calligraphy, with its distortion, combination with other texts and mistranslation into English, has never been a true representation of language. Many other Chinese artists such as Qiu Zhijie, Song Dong and Xu Bing have utilized calligraphy in their work in different ways. What is your attitude to writing in the context of your art and why is it such a significant feature of your work?

WG: My work is concerned with Chinese calligraphy or Chinese words, an interest which began in 1982. The first seal I carved consisted of two fake characters. My study of Russell's and Wittgenstein's philosophy coincided with my study of seal script. It is an ancient form of writing that isn't used today; you can't understand it at all. So I thought of seal script as a fake language. I became really interested in Wittgenstein's theory on the mystery of the universe that cannot be described by language. The other influential factor was the Cultural Revolution. As a Red Guard, I painted slogans because of my painting skills. I still believe that modern calligraphy was produced during the Cultural Revolution under the direction of the Communist Party.

MC: Can you elaborate on how the idea of a new form of calligraphy developed through the `big character posters'?

WG: During the Cultural Revolution, there was a change in the 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 it much livelier, more vital and contemporary than calligraphy by the masters. Today, the mere reworking of old techniques, even if you are solidly trained, is a historical repetition. The farmers and workers involved in the Revolution did not consider what they were doing as art, 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. In Chinese the two characters are cha and shu. I combined both characters so that there is meaning from one character. This character will be featured 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 in 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 lost faith in the power of language, I excluded it entirely from my work. I started to explore materials.

MC: 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 whenever the human body is 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 green 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? You were still coming to terms with another culture and another system in many ways .

WG: I was not satisfied with my creations 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, now in its tenth year, 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 the work comes from because it is international or universal. More than a million people have donated their hair to these works from across the world.

MC: What was your initial attraction to hair?

WG: It was 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 intact after thousands of years. Hair is also associated with so many historical myths from different cultures. I first began using hair in 1989. It felt right, especially when people call this `the biological millennium', an era where science predominates and genetic research is the main focus. With its potential to change a human being, it is the most dangerous and exciting field of research. This is what religious radical groups seem to hate the most. This new millennium calls for something different. My `hair-ink' works are a good example of this. Hair-ink 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. I started thinking about my bio-experimental works in 1988.

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 redo ink painting. When I paint with hair ink, I am painting with human genes. This is different from normal ink painting. I try to get away from convention, but it is not always easy. You have to be brave and to also accept that 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 1980s China; and the third, of living in the West. Can you identify with this explanation of experiences?

WG: There are too many changes to generalize 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. I grew up during the Cultural Revolution and its aftermath, when people lost their faith. And then when China's doors opened, the 1980s art revolution occurred - a complete opposite of the Cultural Revolution. I felt that I was always lost, and then I was an immigrant in 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 autobiography. 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. These concepts are so complicated yet so simple. In the postcolonial, postmodern international world of today, an artist cannot make it if he has only one form of knowledge. In the information age, you have to employ different forms of knowledge. In the 1980s you had more distinctive art movements in, say, America or Europe. Now with more integration and mixing, 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 `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 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 less relevant now. What I want to do is more inclusive - not only speak about identity or racial politics. I want my work 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 the 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: I have been thinking about Tea Alchemy 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 symbolize the Chinese socialist period when life was less efficient, and drinking tea was an essential aspect of one's job. Hot tea is also a symbol of past hardship 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 periods. I am more interested in tea as a culture. In Tea Alchemy (2002) I used tea to produce the paper for the walls of the tearoom, while in previous works I used hair to make ink. Imagine if one were to paint with hair-ink on 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 tea into paper, and the physical transformation where green tea powder falls 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 tradition. I thought about many words until I found this word, `alchemy'. Tea is drunk in many cultures, including Chinese, Japanese, English and Russian. 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.