Calligraphy, poetry and paradoxical power in Wenda Gu's Neon Calligraphy Series

Abstract

Abstract ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS I presented a portion of this research at the 2008 Annual Conference of the College Art Association in Dallas in a paper entitled ‘Commerce into Culture: Wenda Gu's Neon Calligraphy Series.’ For information, ideas, and insights that assisted me in preparing this article I wish to thank Shu-yun Ho, Fang Lihua, John James Kennedy, Katheryn M. Linduff, Ai-lian Liu, Keith McMahon, Kirk Savage, Elizabeth Schultz, Rachel Voorhies, Wang Jing, Wang Ning, Hong Chun Zhang, and Zhou Ying. I am grateful to Hanart TZ Gallery, Ruth Kurzbauer, Nils Nadeau, Marilyn Moore, Wang Jing, Gan Xu and Zheng Yujiao for their help in providing or leading me to images for this article. My colleagues Kris Ercums and Amy McNair were particularly generous in helping me to understand the linguistic intricacies of Wenda Gu's art that I analyze here. Above all I am grateful to Wenda Gu for his patient and good-natured responses to my many questions. Notes 1 – On the association between calligraphy and political power in twentieth-century China see Richard Curt Kraus, Brushes with Power: Modern Politics and the Chinese Art of Calligraphy (Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California Press, 1991); Gordon S. Barrass, The Art of Calligraphy in Modern China (London: British Museum Press, 2002), ch. 2 and passim; and Yuehping Yen, Calligraphy and Social Power in Contemporary Chinese Society (London–New York: Routledge, 2005), passim. 2 – Wenda Gu, ‘Forest of Stone Steles: Retranslation and Rewriting of Tang Poetry, 1993–2005’, in Translating Visuality — Wenda Gu: Forest of Stone Steles, Retranslation and Rewriting of Tang Poetry (Shenzhen, China: OCT-Contemporary Art Terminal of He Xiangning Art Museum, 2005), p. 288. 3 – On Gu Jianchen see Yan Zhou, ‘The Centrality of Culture in Art: The Contemporary Challenge to Chinese Artists, Particularly Wenda Gu’, PhD dissertation, Ohio State University, 2005, pp. 95–8. 4 – David Cateforis, ‘An Interview with Wenda Gu’, in Wenda Gu: Art from Middle Kingdom to Biological Millennium, ed. Mark H.C. Bessire (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2003), p. 143. 5 – Ibid., p. 144. 6 – Wenda Gu, email to the author, 25 November 2007. Zhou, ‘The Centrality of Culture’, p. 102, reports that Gu first studied calligraphy and seal carving under a colleague at the Shanghai Woodcarving Factory, Cao Jianlou. Gu entered the woodcarving factory in 1976 after studying for two years at the Shanghai Arts and Crafts School. 7 – Gu says that he was inspired to create pseudo-seal script when his knife slipped while he was carving a seal stone used to print a seal. Carol Lutfy, ‘Brush with the Past’, ARTnews 99/8 (September 2000), p. 142. Seal carving is sometimes referred to as the ‘Fourth Perfection’ of literati art. 8 – Wenda Gu interviewed by Yan Zhou, Brooklyn, New York, 30 March 2002, quoted in Zhou, ‘The Centrality of Culture’, p. 120. 9 – Gan Xu, ‘Neo-Hexagram: Early Work’, in Bessire, ed., Wenda Gu, pp. 199–200. 10 – Ibid., p. 200. 11 – This interpretation was perhaps first articulated by Jason Chi-seng Kuo in ‘Gu Wenda and his Critics’, a paper delivered at the 77th Annual Meeting of the College Art Association, San Francisco, 1989. 12 – Xu, ‘Neo-Hexagram’, p. 194. Following this decree, only those with written permission from the President of the Association were allowed to view this portion of Gu's show. 13 – On the Oedipus Refound series, see Zhou Yan, ‘Wenda Gu's Oedipus’, in Fragmented Memory: The Chinese Avant-Garde in Exile (Columbus: Wexner Center for the Arts, Ohio State University, 1993), pp. 20–3. 14 – For a survey and analysis of the united nations series to date, see David Cateforis, ‘“The Work Is Not Finished”: Wenda Gu's united nations Series and the Dartmouth Monuments’, in Wenda Gu at Dartmouth: The Art of Installation (Hanover, NH: Hood Museum of Art, Dartmouth College in association with University Press of New England, 2008), pp. 63–85. 15 – Wenda Gu, ‘face the new millennium: the divine comedy of our times’, in Bessire, ed., Wenda Gu, p. 39. 16 – On globalization's promotion of cultural hybridity, see Jan Nederveen Pieterse, Globalization and Cutlure: Global Mélange (Lanham, MD: Rowman & Littlefield, 2004). 17 – Gu, ‘Forest of Stone Steles’, p. 288. 18 – Earlier, smaller groupings of steles and rubbings were displayed at other venues in Australia and the United States between 2001 and 2004. After the Shenzhen showing, 12 steles and corresponding rubbings were shown at the Herbert F. Johnson Museum of Art, Cornell University in early 2007. 19 – Translating Visuality, as in note 2. 20 – The international symposium, ‘Translating Visuality’, was held at the He Xiangning Art Museum in Shenzhen, 19–21 November 2005. 21 – I specify Mandarin because while all literate Chinese read the same language (hanyu, meaning the languages of the Han Chinese, all of which use hanzi as the written script), they speak it in several different dialects, of which Mandarin, the official language of the People's Republic of China, is the dominant one. Speakers of different dialects will typically pronounce the same character differently even though its written form is the same. 22 – This translation, one of several possible ones, is from Raymond Chang and Margaret Scrogin Chang, Speaking of Chinese: A Cultural History of the Chinese Language, rev. ed. (New York: W. W. Norton, 2001), p. 39. 23 – On these books see Allen Hockley, ‘Past and Present in Wenda Gu's Forest of Stone Steles: Retranslation and Rewriting of Tang Dynasty Poetry’, in Wenda Gu at Dartmouth, pp. 87–95. 24 – Gu, ‘Forest of Stone Steles’, p. 291. 25 – Ibid. 26 – For the second, see, for example, Dong Qichang's (1555–1636) emphasis on originality as a criterion of quality in calligraphy, recently analyzed in these pages by Katharine P. Burnett, ‘Words on word-images: an aspect of Dong Qichang's calligraphy criticism’, Word & Image 19/4 (October–December 2003), pp. 327–35. 27 – Gu, ‘Forest of Stone Steles’, p. 291. 28 – Gu thus effectively undoes the modification of the Chinese writing system initiated by the PRC in order to increase literacy. The simplified versions of over 2000 characters are today officially recognized and used in the PRC, Singapore, Malaysia, and by the United Nations, while the older, more complex forms are still used in Taiwan, Hong Kong, Macao, and among some expatriate Chinese communities. 29 – Ellen B. Avril, ‘Wenda Gu, January 20–March 14, 2007’, exhibition brochure (Ithaca, NY: Herbert F. Johnson Museum of Art, Cornell University, 2007), n.p. See also Gu, ‘Forest of Stone Steles’, p. 291. 30 – Peng De, ‘The True Meaning of Forest of Stone Steles’, in Translating Visuality, pp. 326, 329. 31 – Yiguo Zhang, Brushed Voices: Calligraphy in Contemporary China (New York: Miriam and Ira D. Wallach Gallery, Columbia University, 1998), p. 43. 32 – For this and the following see Hockley, ‘Past and Present in Wenda Gu's Forest of Stone Steles’, p. 92. 33 – From the Qing dynasty to the present, calligraphers have, in Chiang Yee's words, ‘tried to put new blood into their imitations of the old masters by incorporating elements from ancient stone inscriptions’. Chiang Yee, Chinese Calligraphy: An Introduction to its Aesthetic and Technique, 3rd ed. (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1973), p. 80. 34 – On the history and uses of neon, both commercial and artistic, see Rudi Stern, The New Let There Be Neon (New York: Harry N. Abrams, 1988) and idem, Contemporary Neon (New York: Retail Reporting Corporation, 1990). 35 – See the artist's website: http://www.wendagu.com 36 – Gu quoted in Josienne N. Piller, ‘A Conversation with Wenda Gu’, in Out of Time, Out of Place, Out of China: Reinventing Chinese Tradition in a New Century, ed. Josienne N. Piller (Pittsburgh: University Art Gallery, University of Pittburgh, 2004), p. 9. The interview is available online at http://vrcoll.fa.pitt.edu/uag/Past-Exhibitions/2004-Out-of-Time-Out-Of-Place/Gu-Wenda/Gu-Wenda-interview.htm (accessed 29 July 2008). See also Gu's statement in Han Zi Reinvented: The Rhythm of Chinese Script (Fullerton: Main Art Gallery, California State University, 2006), p. 21, in which Gu says that calligraphy is ‘just like Chinese opera. A lot of young people cannot really appreciate it and are not interested in it. My work kind of elevates scholarly calligraphy into a modern society, and it becomes a popular medium’. 37 – While classical culture has undoubtedly lost some of its appeal in China due to competition from contemporary popular entertainment and media fixation on current events, Gu's assessment of calligraphy's decline is debatable. Most Chinese today write mainly with pens and keyboards rather than brush and ink but they remain interested in calligraphy and, by many measures, calligraphy is today in China more popular than ever before. The establishment in 1981 of the Chinese Calligraphers Association (CCA) — the country's first such nationwide body — led to the enrollment of hundreds of thousands of calligraphy enthusiasts in the Association's provincial branches, with the top few thousand belonging to the body at the national level. See Barrass, The Art of Calligraphy, pp. 53–4. As of 2003, the Chinese Calligraphers Association numbered some 4000 members. http://www.chinaculture.org/gb/en_artists/2003-09/24/content_26954.htm (accessed 23 June 2008). Hundreds of smaller calligraphy organizations and calligraphy clubs have also sprung up in recent decades. Calligraphy practitioners participate in, and the public flocks to see, calligraphy exhibitions and competitions, sponsored by newspapers, companies and art associations, including the CCA. Numerous newspapers and magazines devoted to calligraphy appear regularly in China. Some cities have special schools for the study of calligraphy, and many Chinese art academies and universities offer graduate degrees in calligraphy. See Zhang, Brushed Voices, pp. 1–4. Although Zhang's account is now over a decade old, the popularity of calligraphy that he describes remains high in China. As one indication of this, People's Daily reported on 26 December 2007 that a competition for Mao Zedong-style calligraphy organized by Shaoshan City, Hunan Province (Mao's birthplace), attracted more than 3200 entries from across China between October and December 2007 (http://english.people.com.cn/90001/90782/6327119.html). Furthermore, the Chinese government is now actively promoting calligraphy education in schools. On 14 September 2006, People's Daily reported the unveiling of a five-year program to boost cultural development, which includes introducing calligraphy, painting and traditional handicraft into the curriculum of China's elementary schools as part of a government drive to bring culture to the young. 38 – For a description of this process in its original historical context, see Robert E. Harrist, Jr., ‘Replication and Deception in the Calligraphy of the Six Dynasties Period’, in Chinese Aesthetics: The Ordering of Literature, the Arts, and the Universe in the Six Dynasties, ed. Zong-qi Cai (Honolulu: University of Hawai'i Press, 2004), p. 47. Gu's outlined neon characters also call to mind visually the work of his contemporary Xu Bing's Square Word Calligraphy Red Line Tracing Book (1994–1995), which presents characters printed in red outlines, with numbers indicating the order of the brushstrokes, over which the student is to write as an exercise in practicing calligraphy. See Britta Erickson, Words without Meaning, Meaning without Words: The Art of Xu Bing (Washington, DC: Arthur M. Sackler Gallery, Smithsonian Institution in association with University of Washington Press, 2001), p. 57. 39 – For analysis of these points see Yen, Calligraphy and Power, pp. 75–80. 40 – Quoted in ibid., p. 75. 41 – http://www.hanart.com/moreExhibition.php?exhibition_number=10&page_number=1 (accessed 3 July 2008). 42 – In keeping with the contemporary flavor of the neon, and in consideration of the promotion of simplified characters by Mao's government, Gu uses the simplified form of qi rather than reverting to the traditional form as he would have in the Forest of Stone Steles. 43 – For this and the following, see Roderick MacFarquhar, The Hundred Flowers Campaign and the Chinese Intellectuals (New York: Frederick A. Praeger, 1960), p. 8. 44 – For a multi-faceted consideration of this topic see Jiang Jiehong, ed., Burden or Legacy: From the Chinese Cultural Revolution to Contemporary Art (Hong Kong: Hong Kong University Press, 2007). 45 – On Mao as a calligrapher see Kraus, Brushes with Power, passim, and Barrass, The Art of Calligraphy, chs 2–3. 46 – Significantly, Deng Xiaoping, as part of his post-Cultural Revolution reforms, echoed Mao's words in proclaiming the Two Hundreds (shuangbai) directive at the Third Plenary Session of the XI Central Committee of December 1978. See Martina Köppel-Yang, Semiotic Warfare: The Chinese Avant-Garde, 1979–1989. A Semiotic Analysis (Hong Kong: timezone 8, 2003), p. 40. Deng's revival of the Hundred Flowers campaign was meant to encourage artistic freedom, which nevertheless remained officially limited in 1980s — as the censorship of Gu's 1986 exhibition in Xi'an demonstrates — and which was further curtailed in the early 1990s following the 4 June 1989 Tiananmen Square incident. President Jiang Zemin articulated the Three Represents in a series of speeches and party meetings between 2000 and 2002. See http://www.idcpc.org.cn/english/policy/3represents.htm (accessed 20 June, 2008). According to Martina Köppel-Yang, through official support for contemporary art and culture the Chinese government sought to demonstrate a commitment to pluralism and democracy to bolster its bid to join the World Trade Organization, which succeeded in September 2001. Köppel-Yang also notes that China's Tenth Five-Year Plan for National Economic and Social Development (passed March 2001), promotes the development of ‘more and better intellectual and cultural works’ and ‘industries related to culture’, along with the organization and standardization of ‘the cultural market’, all of which have encouraged the explosive growth of the Chinese contemporary art market. See Martina Köppel-Yang, ‘The Surplus Value of Accumulation: Some Thoughts’, Yishu: Journal of Chinese Contemporary Art, 6/4 (December 2007), p. 17. Even with this official promotion of advanced art, Chinese artists still do not enjoy complete artistic freedom. They may not publicly display in China without risk of censorship work that is pornographic, violent or critical of the government. See Melissa Chiu, Chinese Contemporary Art: 7 Things You Should Know (New York: AW Asia, 2008), pp. 58, 60. 47 – For example, Xu Bing in the 1970s followed folk tradition in combining auspicious four character phrases into complex, single characters. See Xu Bing, ‘The Living Word’, trans. Ann L. Huss, in Erickson, Words without Meaning, p. 17 and figures 7 and 8 (on pp. 18–19). Beginning around 2000, calligrapher Sa Benjie (b. 1948) also created numerous combined characters. See Barrass, The Art of Calligraphy, figures 26 and 27 (pp. 31–2) and figure 131 (p. 225). 48 – In a 21 October 2004 email to the author, Gu wrote: ‘gu's phrase is my own invention. in chinese language, one word (single character) is not a phrase. to form a chinese phrase, it needs 2 or more words. in my gu's phrase, 2 chinese characters combined become one’. (The artist always writes in all lower-case letters.) In a later conversation, Gu stated his ambition to create a whole dictionary of ‘Gu's phrases’. Wenda Gu in conversation with the author, Ithaca, New York, 3 March 2007. 49 – Organized by the Italian curator Isabella Brancolini, the exhibition ‘Chinese Object: Dreams and Obsessions’ was on view in the gallery space of the Ferragamo flagship store at 655 Fifth Avenue at 52nd Street between 21 June and 31 August 2004. The included artists were Ai Weiwei, Hong Lei, Hong Hao, Lin Tianmiao, Liu Jianhua, Yin Xiuzhen, Wenda Gu, Wang Jin, and Wang Gongxin. See http://www.asiasociety.org/arts/past_future/events.html (accessed 25 June 2008). 50 – For a trenchant Neo-Marxist analysis of the relationship between corporations and contemporary art, see Julian Stallabrass, Art Incorporated (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2004; also reprinted in 2006 by the same press as Contemporary Art: A Very Short Introduction). Unlike Stallabrass and other Leftists, Gu, although raised under Marxist ideology in China, has, like many of his countrymen, come to accept capitalist values (albeit not without irony) and, following the example of Andy Warhol, has in recent years begun willingly to ally his art to advertising and consumerism. For a refreshingly affirmative analysis of many contemporary artists’ embrace of materialism and mainstream capitalist culture, see Johanna Drucker, Sweet Dreams: Contemporary Art and Complicity (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2005). 51 – In addition to the neons actually executed, Gu has made studies for other neons based on the names of educational institutions and art museums, including Texas A&M University (where he served as artist-in-residence in 2006); California State University, Fullerton (where his work was included in the 2006 exhibition Han Zi Reinvented); and the Denver Art Museum and the Detroit Institute of Arts, which both explored the possibility of commissioning a neon. 52 – On this point see Yee, Chinese Calligraphy, pp. 3–4, and Chang and Chang, Speaking of Chinese, pp. 134–5. 53 – On Chinese four-character idiomatic expressions, many of them derived from classical Chinese and still employed in today's vernacular language, see http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Four-character_idiom (accessed 25 June 2008). 54 – My source for this and all subsequent English translations of Chinese characters is The Pinyin Chinese–English Dictionary, editor-in-chief Wu Jingrong (Hong Kong: Commercial Press and New York: Wiley, 1979). 55 – See http://vrcoll.fa.pitt.edu/uag/Past-Exhibitions/2004-Out-of-Time-Out-Of-Place/Exhibit-Mainpage.html (accessed 26 June 2008). 56 – As he did with qi in the bai hua qi fang neon, Gu writes ti, bao, and ge in their simplified forms, departing from his use of the traditional forms in the Forest of Stone Steles to give his neon an appropriately contemporary flavor. 57 – The work was displayed under this title in both the University of Pittsburgh show and the exhibition ‘Han Zi Reinvented: The Rhythm of Chinese Script’, at the Main Art Gallery, California State University, Fullerton, 9 September–13 October 2006. See the catalogues, Out of Time, Out of Place, Out of China, p. 8, and Han Zi Reinvented, pp. 19–20. 58 – Gu, email to the author, 28 November 2007. 59 – For numerous examples, see http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chinglish (accessed 26 June 2008). In preparation for the 2008 Summer Olympics, the Beijing government stepped up efforts to eradicate embarrassing Chinglish from public signs. See the BBC News report, ‘Beijing Stamps out Poor English’, http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/world/asia-pacific/6052800.stm (accessed 26 June 2008). 60 – See http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Shinny (accessed 26 June 2008). 61 – Shop.NHL.com currently offers for sale a framed ‘Hockey Art’ print showing a Pittsburgh Penguins jersey and equipment in an ‘after shinny’ arrangement. See http://shop.nhl.com/sm-hockey-art-pittsburgh-penguins-after-shinny-framed-print-pi-1923587.html (accessed 26 June 2008). 62 – In a 26 June 2008 email to the author, University of Pittsburgh hockey general manager Andy Mecs wrote: ‘The word “shinny” is recognizable to many hockey players and enthusiasts. However, most casual fans are not likely to be familiar with the word. It is primarily a Canadian term. Americans will more commonly refer to the term as pick-up hockey or scrimmaging’. 63 – Pinyin Chinese-English Dictionary, p. 598, gives ‘color’ as the character's first meaning. Typically, Chinese nouns can also function as adjectives depending on their context in a phrase or sentence. 64 – Wenda Gu, in conversation with the author, Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania, 20 January 2005. 65 – On this auction, see Carol Vogel, ‘Sotheby's Bets a Windfall for Today's Chinese Art’, New York Times 29 March 2006, http://www.nytimes.com/2006/03/29/arts/design/29auct.html and idem, ‘China: The New Contemporary-Art Frontier’, New York Times, 1 April 2006, http://www.nytimes.com/2006/04/01/arts/design/01auct.html?scp=6&sq=sotheby%27s&st=nyt (accessed 26 June 2008). See also Allen T. Cheng, ‘Art Rush Gains Steam in China: New Money Chases Contemporary Works in Booming Market’, International Herald Tribune, 18 June 2006, http://www.iht.com/articles/2006/07/18/bloomberg/sxrich.php?page=2 (accessed 26 June 2008). 66 – Because Gu has broken down the name Sotheby's into fragments that comprise actual English words (‘so’, ‘the’ and ‘by’) and because of the relationship of these words to those below them on each panel, it is possible to read the English in this neon vertically, panel by panel (essentially ignoring the Chinese characters in the middle), to yield ‘so simple the thoughts by greens temple’. This is a result not intended by the artist, demonstrating the degree to which Gu's work, like all poetry — and any cultural text for that matter — opens itself up to creative response by the reader. 67 – The third character in the column, 楷 kai meaning ‘regular or model (script)’, Gu has refashioned according to his process developed in the Forest of Stone Steles, moving the left, ‘tree’, radical to the top. 68 – For examples see Shi Bo, Between Heaven and Earth: A History of Chinese Writing, trans. Sherab Chödzin Kohn (Boston and London: Shambhala, 2003), pp. 98–9. 69 – Wenda Gu, in conversation with the author, Ithaca, New York, 3 March 2007. Gu intended the same reference through his use of the word in the title of his recent installation at Dartmouth College, united nations - the green house (2007), meant to highlight the cost of higher education in the United States and the connections between elite colleges and universities and big business. See Cateforis, ‘“The Work Is Not Finished”,’ p. 79. 70 – In the case of 嗆 qiang Gu uses the traditional rather than simplified form of the character, and moves the left radical to the top. In the case of 那 na he moves the left radical to the top and returns the right, ‘ear’, radical to the more complex form it has when it stands alone (耳). In the case of 飲 yin he again uses the traditional rather than simplified form of the character and moves the right radical to the bottom. In the case of 德 de he again shifts the left ‘people’ radical to the top and also changes its form to that of the ‘double man’ radical. In the case of 穵 wa he adds the ‘hand’ radical (手) to the top. In the case of 得 de he shifts the left ‘people’ radical to the top and changes its form that of the ‘double man’ radical. In the case of 鴯 er he again shifts the left radical to the top. In the case of 到 dao he shifts the ‘knife’ radical from the left to the bottom and gives it the form it has when it stands alone (刀). In the case of 们 men he unexpectedly keeps the simplified form of the character rather than reverting to the traditional form (們), although he again shifts the left ‘person’ radical to the top and changes its form to the one it has when it stands independently (人). In the case of 特 te he shifts the left radical to top and gives it its independent form (牛). In the case of 怡 yi he shifts the left ‘heart’ radical to the top and gives it the form it has when independent or at the bottom of a character (心). In the case of 訓 xun Gu uses the traditional form and moves the right ‘river’ (川) radical's three elements to the left, right and bottom sides. 71 – Wenda Gu, email to the author, 26 November 2007. 72 – Wenda Gu, email to the author, 26 November 2007. See also http://ocat.com.cn/en/show-1.asp?id=351 (accessed 30 July 2008). 73 – Martin Juaristi, ‘A Vista of Perspectives at OCAT’, Shenzhen Buzz http://www.shenzhenbuzz.com/af_01 (accessed 30 June 2008). 74 – Wenda Gu, email to the author, 29 November 2007. 75 – Wenda Gu, email to the author, 14 November 2007. 76 – Wenda Gu, email to the author, 15 June 2008. 77 – John Gittings, The Changing Face of China: From Mao to Market (Oxford University Press, 2006), p. 208. 78 – Erik Eckholm, ‘In Beijing, Reminders of '89 Protest Are Few’, New York Times, 4 June 1999, http://query.nytimes.com/gst/fullpage.html?res=9505EFDF1639F937A35755C0A96F958260 (accessed 30 June 2008). 79 – Neal Stephenson, ‘In the Kingdom of Mao Bell’, Wired (February 1994) http://www.wired.com/wired/archive/2.02/mao.bell_pr.html (accessed 30 June 2008). 80 – As of this writing, plans are underway to install permanently Gu's Cultural Transference — A Neon Calligraphy Series: University of Pittsburgh, in the university's Frick Fine Arts building.