The secret story behind Dartmouth library’s hair curtains
Editor’s Note: In spring of 2007–months prior to Dartmouth’s hair installation, the author traveled to China to film a documentary about the artist, Wenda Gu, and the Shanghai art scene. Initially completely sold on the legitimacy of Gu’s project, the author soon found a string of unexpected discoveries that left him increasingly dismayed and confused. Four months in the making, this article tells the secret story of Wenda Gu and how the Dartmouth project came into being.
In 1987 Wenda Gu left Shanghai forever, or so he thought. Even in China’s increasingly relaxed pre-Tiananmen climate, things boded poorly for revolutionary artists. At the beginning of his international career, Gu had boldly experimented, combining traditional Chinese characters in his well-known ink paintings to create third, unreadable characters–a result he would later title ‘pseudo-characters’. But Chinese elites who saw Gu’s art displayed at a contemporary gallery opening puzzled at the illegible result, assuming that the warped words held a potentially subversive message. The show was closed. After protest and an appeal to his historical disinterest in political matters–Wenda Gu himself was a member of the Mao youth, the Red Guard–the show reopened, but to a closed audience of artists. The elites had decided they were the only group that could potentially handle the work’s supposed “political” message. It wouldn’t be long until Gu left for New York, and China lost him, perhaps forever.
The tale that follows has since become something of legend for Gu’s followers. “I left China at the age of 32, so I was already set up,” Gu said. “Then I spent 20 years in the United States, so my life is split in two.” Yet just as he began his speech the Shanghai studio phone rang. He called to his Chinese studio assistant in a completely different tone. His face contorted as an angrier, almost contemptuous expression swept across his lips, instructing her, in Chinese, to answer it. His ponytail swung daintily as he snapped his neck.
A week and a half later, a tour group of NYU students visiting the Shanghai art space received the same story, word for word, we had heard a week and a half earlier, but without interruption he managed to add a couple of details along the way. “As a guy from the cultural revolution who started out as a Red Guard, so exotic, to succeed is the American Dream,” Gu said. “I came to the United States with 24 dollars in my pocket and spoke no English. Now I can make 800 dollars per hour. Not so bad for an American Dream. Now I’m trying to bring my American dream to here. Trying to create a China Dream.”
Over the past few years, Wenda Gu has slowly built his China Dream in a long-abandoned warehouse in Shanghai’s up-and-coming art district, Moganshan Road. As the city has boomed, massive redistricting efforts left a string of abandoned plants and production lines derelict along the former industrial hotbed of Suzhou Creek. About ten years ago, a single art gallery began converting these industrial spaces into studios. Since then, an entire art district has sprung up in what used to be a harbor city with a stock market and little culture.
Wenda Gu strolls alongside the Dartmouth hair installation in his Shanghai studio
But China soon found it could remove industry from the creek, but not commerce from its art. In recent years Shanghai’s massive market has driven art production. As the middle class has grown, so too has the demand for commissioned works. The boom has resulted in the uncontrollable fabrication of works that look like little more than Western reproductions or Eastern copies. “Chinese art is selling like a hot cake,” Christine Choy, NYU Professor and Shanghai filmmaker said. “Tell me why.”
Christine Choy talks about the state of art in China
In this context Gu’s art stands out as unique. He described himself as living in what exile theorist Homi Bhabha calls the “third space.” Wenda Gu is neither here nor there, neither American nor Chinese. After 20 years in America and over 30 in his homeland, Gu had returned to both see his parents and to take advantage of lower labor costs. He knows little of contemporary Shanghai; his nightlife and dining recommendations echo those of the average tourist. Wenda Gu is a visitor in his own home. And rightly so.
Non-westernized Chinese citizens don’t respect Wenda Gu, nor do they support the market for his art. After his disappearance from the Chinese art world, many felt a code of honor had been broken. Gu had abandoned them and left for the more profitable West. Our translator told us that some Chinese call him a bien tae–which roughly translates to hermaphrodite. Wenda Gu, she claimed, a cultural hermaphrodite–a striking insult given Chinese views on sexual “perversion”–to them he is some breed of half human.
In order to make his living, Gu goes abroad, relying on a series of large international commissions and sensational projects that entice the interests of foreign governments and national museums. Over a two week period, curators from MOMAs in Los Angeles and New York, a purchasing group from a prominent Dutch museum, and a wealthy Hong Kong designer visited his relatively modest roadside studio. All were investigating potential commissions.
Gu’s propensity for monumental work with sensational materials launched him quickly into the international spotlight. Human hair and other biological fodder became his medium of choice. Shows like Oedipus Refound, which combined menstrual blood, placenta powder and blood from miscarriages, garnered international attention. Gu became famous for his overstated, often sensational pieces. Deke Erh, a well-known Chinese architectural photographer, described one such early piece made from flypaper. Hundreds of flies were caught by the paper, its gooey yellow turning into a seething, malevolent black. From far away, it looked like a solid line, but visitors were shocked when they approached the dead mass. From a distance the symbol had a meaning. “The papers created a giant big character with a popular saying from the cultural revolution,” Erh said.
During his days as a Red Guard, Wenda Gu tells everyone, he had been selected due to “a certain fine art skill” to create these big character posters. These posters were the basis for elite hit jobs during the Cultural Revolution. On street corners they announced who was out of favor, who would no longer be protected by gang violence, and who could be killed. Many died as a result of the posters, as they became the regime’s most powerful weapons. It was during the production of these that Gu first became interested in the separation between form and meaning in writing. He found he could paint the form without attaching any meaning to his work. From this, the pseudo-characters were born.
In some parts of Shanghai, specimens of these posters are preserved in museums. We found this one in a secret basement gallery
Like many other aspects of his work, the pseudo-characters have a dual interpretation. For most superficial observers they hint toward deconstruction, a theme in art made famous by such lionized figures as Cy Twombly and Frank Gehry. And, in fact, Director of the Hood Museum at Dartmouth College, Brian Kennedy, mentions this meaning first in press releases and public declarations when discussing Wenda Gu’s intentions. His interpretation appeals to the multiplicity of meanings present in Gu’s work. But in hours of interviews, not once did Gu mention deconstruction. Instead, he clearly expressed his work’s intentions, intentions which do not often coincide with those that the Western art world assigns. So when Kennedy asked Gu to create a united nations hair monument for Dartmouth College, the first such work for a university, many students seemed more confused than proud of the panels that hung in their beautiful library’s foyer. The hair was here. But what did it mean?*** * ***
It wasn’t the first time Kennedy and Gu had collaborated. In 2000, as director of Sydney Australia’s National Gallery of Art, the self-described “secular archbishop” of the art world brought a hairstravaganza to the NGA from the budding Gu. The result was an enormous exhibition including two “hair alchemy” pieces–ink sticks transformed from human hair–, several installations, the united nations, Australia monument, the Forest of Stone Steles, and performance art. Kennedy claims that this was Gu’s first major survey show.
So during the job interviews for directorship of the Hood Museum, Kennedy toted his Gu credentials. Kennedy wanted to make art more public, more relevant than it had ever been in Hanover, and Gu would be the perfect artist to pursue. Kennedy contacted Gu within 6 weeks of his appointment in 2005, to invite his interest. Gu arrived in February of 2006.
But Kennedy had taken no small amount of flak for some of the exhibition decisions he had made as director of the National Gallery of Art, decisions that may have ultimately led to his resignation. Kennedy’s leaving followed a sticky web of political intrigue–including domestic opposition to the foreign Irishman running Australia’s art scene, supposedly flagging staff morale, an air conditioning system wrongfully accused of damaging million-dollar art works, and the decaying physical plant itself. Perhaps more than other factors, the final straw came when controversy erupted after Sensation–a combination of pieces including a Madonna of elephant dung complete with explicit pictures, and works made of flies, maggots, cow’s heads, a split pig carcass and frozen blood–almost graced Kennedy’s museum floors. The exhibition would be cancelled after it was scheduled when opposition rocked Australia.
In an ABC interview regarding the cancellation of Sensation, Kennedy expressed regret, noting that such sensational shows tend to garner increased visitation. “I think the evidence in terms of those who go to museums is that an exhibition that is calculated in that way will attract a very large audience and I have no doubt that in Australia it would have very much broadened the age of profile of the audience in Canberra,” Kennedy said.
During his tenure so far at Dartmouth, Kennedy has decided to focus on artists with multicultural backgrounds, hosting a string of exhibitions from indigenous cultures. Over the past two years, Papua New Guinean art, an aboriginal Australian exhibition, and two Inuit shows have graced the Hood’s galleries. To a certain extent, Gu follows this lineage. In Hood press releases he is advertised as a “Chinese” artist or a “Chinese artist living in America.” These releases emphasize the exotic, despite Gu’s publicly preferring identification as an international artist, and Kennedy’s latent admission that Gu is instead an “International artist raised in China.” In a business-like fashion, Gu’s identity has been deliberately packaged by Kennedy and the Hood museum, in a desire to emphasize the exotic, the extraordinary, the sensational, over the usual.
Perhaps for Kennedy, in the acquisition of Wenda Gu’s piece, business interests simply outweighed any possible costs. Since Brian took over, my source within Dartmouth’s administration said, “the museum is less about art and more about events…[It’s about h]owever the museum can gain money; however it can contribute to Dartmouth’s capital campaign.”
Although Kennedy is an uncontroversially great curator, he has not focused on art alone during his tenure. “Brian Kennedy is primarily a well-educated businessman,” my source said, “For a museum director to have these qualities at this time is very propitious. He does an amazing job with development and the schmoozing of overseers.” And to a great extent this approach has succeeded. The Gu show has garnered more positive national press than any other Hood exhibition in memory. Gu’s art was an advertisement in an institute of higher education.
So when the displayed work appeared June 4 in Baker Library reading “Educations/Advertises”–the characters overlapping one another–the message seemed startlingly appropriate. For some students, the work felt like a stab in the back. Who was Wenda Gu to suggest that Dartmouth’s education was commercial? Or was that even what Wenda Gu was suggesting at all?
In interviews with Gu, he explained that the words he chose, and the message he wished to convey applied specifically to Dartmouth College. “The title is the green house,” he said. “Green is the symbol of Dartmouth College. So this is a work created completely for Dartmouth College.”
The slogan itself appealed partly to Dartmouth’s history of education: Gu saw the supposed education of Native Americans in the school’s original charter as an advertisement, a raison d’etre for a school that never fulfilled its mission in the centuries that followed. But Gu also clarified that he meant the statement to apply to modern day education as well. “…It’s a question of the school as a company to make money,” Gu said. “But also it’s advice from the politicians. Politicians selected the textbook for you to read. So they want you to learn a certain part of education, or a certain part of history, omit a certain part of history. It’s a question of education and the commercialization of education.”
At first it seemed that he spoke generally about political control over textbook selection, in his native China or in American public primary education. But when asked a second time, in a different interview, to clarify his position, he repeated the same statement: It was meant to apply to Dartmouth College, where the government does not in fact control its school books. It began to look as though Wenda Gu’s Dartmouth project wasn’t so specialized after all.*** * ***
“The Dartmouth hair to come to China–the work to be made in a foreign land and shipped back–is also a kind of interesting journey,” Gu said. But interesting just doesn’t cut it.
The project began as all monuments do, in the form of a commission. When it comes to the amount of money spent to bring the united nations to Dartmouth, rumors outweighed facts as the Hood cautiously embargoed the information from Dartmouth’s community. At stake was the power of commission. If artists were to know how much the Hood had paid for Gu’s work, their asking price would be influenced by the Hood’s previous bid.
As a result, estimates as high as $2 million circulated the student body’s rumor mills. But in truth the commission was only a small fraction of that. Gu’s work actually cost $50,000, according to a source within Dartmouth’s administration.
The hair’s second life as art began with Gu’s arrival at Dartmouth February of 2005. In the following months, 42,350 haircuts would be collected from the local community and shipped first by truck, then by boat to Shanghai. All the material that formed the hair and Elmer’s glue panels came from Upper Valley community members. Additional hair for the six-mile braid that snakes through the rear portion of Berry Library was gathered from women in India, who, Gu explained, tend to have the long hair he needs for this part of the project.
Gu designs the hair panels and the relatively simple architectural layout of the braids using computer software. The designs are then printed on giant sheets of paper which form the pattern for Gu’s installations.
After arriving at Gu’s Moganshan Road studio, the crates of hair are unpacked by an unlikely team of four women. From here on, these women have nearly autonomous control over the project. Gu considers the thickness and the mixing of hair colors relatively arbitrary. “I design it, and then I have the workshops finish the work,” he said. Hair is simply removed from the plastic bag, washed in soap and water by the women, and then spread, using a mixture of Elmer’s glue and hair, over a plastic sheet. Wenda Gu functions only as inspector of the finished product, sometimes asking the women to start over when the thickness, or the color, is excessively uneven.
The women then dye and braid the hair that arrives from India. The four sit around a low table on short, backless stools, for hours at a time, weaving the hair by hand into long, fine braids. While in Shanghai, the documentary team with which I worked was active for 16 hours a day gathering interviews. The women at the studio were always there before we arrived and remained there long after we had gone. We estimated their average hours likely exceeded 12 per day.
Of Gu’s worker’s, one had formerly worked on the production line at a wig factory outside Shanghai. She described her life prior to Gu’s studio as more fulfilling. “Actually, I was happier working in the factory because first all of it was much easier working with the hair there,” she said. “There were also more people there, and I was friends with many of them… We had the means to live in the factory.”
The salary at her previous job, however, had been surprisingly low. Totaling a mere 500-600 RMB per month, it would take her an entire month of work to buy a single wig. At that rate, assuming a 5 day work week (an unlikely low figure), she made no more than 30 RMB per day, less than $2.50. Truth told, cultural differences in China that cause many Chinese to preference manufacturing products over art no doubt figured into her preferring the factory job. But China is also a relentlessly materialistic society. Salary always plays in matters of pride.
Another worker had an even more interesting story to tell. Her noticeably young face, unnecessarily puffy black winter jacket and bright turtleneck stood out among her fellow workers. She was the sister of one of the other women, and appeared no older than 16, although our translator estimated her to be as young as 13. During filming, Gu’s studio director, Wang Jing, took me by the arm, and instructed that I not film the young girl. She explained that she was too young to be working and did not know what problems would result from her presence. Wang had told her not to work while we were present with cameras, but the girl had not listened. She needed the money.The underage girl in the green turtleneck looks unhappily from her work**[Click to enlarge]**
The workers, including the young girl, labor deep into the night
Elsewhere in Shanghai, Gu was using the small fortune he and his designer wife had amassed to renovate an old mansion to be resold as a wine bar. The whole project cost a total of $5 million U.S. or $40 million RMB, an incredible fortune by Chinese standards. Everything, everywhere in the house, was custom made. Lacquer banisters erupted from finely stuccoed walls. Gu and his wife, Kathryn Scott, had flown in a team of Italian experts to show their Shanghai workers how it was done. The Chinese had learned their trade well. The unfinished result was spectacular.
Most of the house’s workers lived in the yet unfinished basement. Some, the bosses, had beds with steel frames, but the majority slept on thin mats that lined the floor. As we walked down the basement’s dark stairwell, we caught one of the men urinating into a small chamber pot that looked more like a plastic doggy dish. Pee splattered the floor and ran along the sides of the walls in other places. The conditions were worrying.
The workers’ beds in Gu’s basement
Workers play cards in Gu’s basement next to a suspicious liquid stain plastering the wall
Other works Gu commissioned are sent to a local factory with which he has formed a relatively solid relationship. But when we tried to take a look at the factory, due to growing interest in the production process, Gu became oddly cold and angry. We could hear his voice on the phone as he yelled in Chinese at the translator, and when she, tearful, passed it on to our film’s director, he was still terse, nervous, and furious.
“I am Gu Wenda,” two of us later translated from our interpreter’s conversation. “Haven’t I done enough for you? You are asking too much of me!”*** * ***
Brian Kennedy, Director of the Hood Museum, refused to officially confirm or deny knowledge of the working conditions in Gu’s Shanghai studios. I had met with Kennedy in the spring to interview him regarding some of the questions about Wenda Gu that had arisen after my stay in China. I informed him that the interview was not for publication, and that I would clear all quotations with him before going to press. When I approached him about the interview in the fall, however, Kennedy refused permission to print any of the information gathered during this interview.
Kennedy, however, had been clearly unnerved by the experience. Upon Gu’s visit to Dartmouth, he promptly informed Gu and a former professor of my apparent attempts at mischief. This professor and others, apparently upon Kennedy’s information, attempted to dissuade publication of this article. At Kennedy’s behest, an uncomfortable situation ensued.
The same source within Dartmouth’s administration told me that h/she couldn’t see how Dartmouth could have had knowledge of working conditions behind the acquisition. “Nor am I surprised that that’s the case,” the source said. “If anyone would have knowledge, though, Brian would.”
But by the time the commission was in full swing, Dartmouth had encountered a host of unexpected problems. Communication had somehow lapsed. Given Gu’s notoriously erratic e-mail protocol–I contacted him for comment on this piece, but he was unavailable–this is no surprise. But according to rumor, on Gu’s Dartmouth arrival, he didn’t like the setup at all. He immediately ordered the exhibit completely redone. Gu’s fickle temperament had already given some the impression that he didn’t really care about the show.
Then there was the issue of the process itself. As time passed, evidence mounted that Gu hadn’t produced his art ‘by hand’ as had been expected. Instead, his commissions were being manufactured by hired workers. “Wenda Gu really talked up the quality of the books he created as though he were doing it personally,” my source said, referring to a set of rubbings simultaneously put on show at the College. “But he didn’t work on the project at all, he just farmed it out.”
Part of the problem is that Wenda Gu, despite “farming” the labor, would naturally attribute the work to his own hands, even given evidence to the contrary. “I guarantee that he would take full credit for it,” the source said. “He wouldn’t give that information up front.”
Shady production details are hardly the only reason to question the legitimacy of the piece as art. Lu Chi, the first MFA glass artist in China and master artist in her own right perhaps put it best. “I think that real artists should do every process by themselves, because every process gives them the opportunity to do more creative things,” she said. “Maybe I will change my mind when doing certain processes. Maybe I will decide to change the shape, color, or cut something during the art process. I’m a very Ming [dynasty] artist. I don’t want other people to share this kind of interesting jobs [sic]. I like to do all of them by myself.”
That, Lu Chi explained, makes all the difference between glass artists and glass designers.
Lu Chi talks to TDI about glass design*** * ***
15 years ago photographer Deke Erh had interviewed Wenda Gu before his rise to fame. Things were different then. The private man had not yet been traded for a public persona and, both being budding artists, Gu had opened up to his colleague. Erh explained that the interview had been incredibly revealing.
“When I interviewed him…he had very strong feelings to take revenge against the Western world, but he was not successful,” Erh said. “Gu Wenda’s former teacher Lu Yen-Zhou is a very great traditional Chinese painter, and Gu Wenda was very much a follower of Chinese traditional culture. He believed that Chinese traditional culture could defeat Western culture. But he is now very absorbed by Western culture.”
So one shouldn’t be surprised that Gu’s acquaintances often describe him as an angry person, an administrative source calling him “kind of a prick.” Fear, however, has closely attended the anger others felt from Gu. “When I first met Wenda, it was obvious that half the people in the room were afraid of him,” the source said about Gu’s visit to Dartmouth. “He felt that and started barking orders at them.”
Gu’s failed revenge lurks, a haunting motif not just in his personality, but in his work. “Gu Wenda is a creature made by the Western world, because the Western world needs rebellious people,” Erh explained.
My source within the administration independently concurred. “Wenda is trying to seek some sort of retribution on the Western World and is mocking its education in this Dartmouth installation,” the source said.
Kennedy introduces Gu to Provost Barry Scherr and President Wright at the exhibition’s Dartmouth opening
The sensational mode in which Gu works brought him the much-needed fame that launched him into international art glory, even when he was derided as insensitive. Human hair’s closest association being the Holocaust, it seems no coincidence that his earliest monuments tended to be in the most controversial of places. In 1993 Gu’s first major piece, united nations-poland monument: hospitalized history museum, was situated not far from a concentration camp. Due to international protests, the monument had to be prematurely closed. Two years later he built another project at a controversial site, Israel, which consisted of solely Jewish hair strewn on pink limestone. This second project, too, garnered an inordinate amount of international attention due to controversy.
And the controversy made him rich. Beginning in 1995, the monumental commissions began flowing regularly, until 27 countries could claim their own piles of hair. Better yet, Gu quickly found that his system was unbeatable. By collecting hair from local communities, a network of support grew around the proposed commission. “You have to draw people’s attention or have them psychologically identify with the work,” Gu explained. “…This kind of work actually draws the local interest.”
The combination of local support and international controversy could hardly be better allies on his way to fame. By the time the hair had been transformed into art in his Shanghai studio, Gu had combined two benefits that rarely go hand in hand in the art world: maximum controversy with maximum profits.
Wenda Gu’s art playfully toys with liberal themes without actually subscribing to them. For Gu, this has served as a clever advertising technique and perhaps the primary reason Gu’s art has been so popular with Western curators. It seemingly aims toward utopia, but has an edge.
In further discussions with Gu, however, the artist described himself as “disillusioned,” far from the idealist that many make him out to be. He titles his art the united nations but has no official connection to the governing body. What he really refers to, Gu will tell you, is the biological millennium: the threshold reached by biological science that will result in a eugenic mixing of all races.
Gu’s biological millennium is a scary “romantic story” that results inevitably in the destruction of mankind and the creation of new species. “If there’s a war you can create the hundred thousand soldiers you need in a scientific laboratory,” Gu laughs. “These artificial species, they’ll fight each other, it’s like a video game, like an arcade game. You just push the button.”
He differentiates his way of thinking about history, and about the future, from the West’s standard vision. “Eventually we’ll vanish,” Gu said. “This is the only thing I can imagine. The thing is I’m more into the Buddhist approach than the progressive Caucasian philosophy of progress, progressives and occupation and invention.”
And when asked about the artist’s social responsibility Gu responded, “These are very philosophical problems, much heavier than my art creation really. I’m not a social scientist.”
But Gu is inconsistent. Sometimes he expresses ideals similar to those he derides. “I have a utopian, romantic idea of trying to blend everything together,” he explained. “My work tries to be maximum inclusive.”
Even Gu himself recognizes this psychological splitting. His personality is neither all here nor there. Neither West nor East, neither totally disillusioned, nor totally illusioned. And, Gu suggested, this could be the very secret to his success.
“For me, I have kind of a conflict.” Gu said. “I’m not totally from the older generation [of Chinese artists] because they are always into the art for art’s sake kind of theory. For me I have 20 years in New York. … So for me I have this kind of conflicting two parts. And this is what made me rich, because I’m not completely older generation artist nor am I totally younger generation.”
He trained in marketing art in New York, but learned how to do art for art’s sake from his master in China. Over time, he began to buy into both. His personality is a cross, a cross between worlds: between communism and capitalism, between China and America, between sincerity and profiteering, between liberalism and doom.
So who is the true Wenda Gu? Is he the young man so fascinated by Brave New World or the cultural diplomat who longs to bring two cultures together? Is he the Red Guard of his youth or the internationalist liberal others claim him to be?
We may never know the extent of Gu’s sincerity. Gu himself may not be sure. But it never hurts to ask.
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