Look at basic facts first Title, medium and date Who is the artist? What is the size?

1. Analysing a painting in content • Look at basic facts first Title, medium and date • Who is the artist? • What is the size? • When was it painted? • Why was it painted? • Where does the image fit on a timeline? • Why is it so important to read a painting in historical content?

2. Degas Little Dancer, Aged Fourteen (1879—1881)

3. GuWenda (Chinese, b.1955)

4. Education • was born in 1955 in Shanghai. He studied at the Shanghai School of Arts and Crafts and Zhejiang Academy of Fine Arts in Hangzhou. • His training in traditional Chinese painting, particularly calligraphy, laid the foundation for much of his later work, whether scroll painting or other less conventional media.

5. training • He studied traditional Chinese landscape painting under master Lu Yanshao (1909–1993) at China Academy of Arts, and taught there after his graduation in 1981 • Embracing the Western New Wave and avant-garde movements, • Wenda felt they could lead to the creation of specifically-Chinese avant-garde art. In 1984, his early series Lost Dynasties astonished the traditional Chinese art community when they were exhibited

6. He developed a bibliography of invented Chinese characters by deconstructing the existing ones, and then misplacing the various parts to create new and meaningless words. • This series of works on paper and installations, Pseudo, was to be presented to the public in Wenda’s first solo exhibition in 1986, but it was closed down by the government just before the opening. • Why do you think that was?

10. WendaGu immediately invited controversy with his manipulation and re-formation of traditional Chinese calligraphy. • His larger than life confronting canvases, filled with nonsensical characters or quirky word plays, challenged the expectations of the viewer. • Unable to find a place for his work within the strict confines of a rigid Chinese bureaucratic order, the artist eventually left his homeland for the Unites States of America in 1987.

11. America • In 1987, Wenda moved to the United States and changed his medium to materials related to human body, with the intention of celebrating the physical origins of life, and to promote universal accord

13. United Nations, producing works from human hair he had collected from more than one million people from all over the world, appeared on the cover of Art US, making Wenda the first Chinese artist to be featured in this magazine. • He now lives and works in New York

14. In the early 1980’s he explored radical extensions of the traditional technique in a series of large semi-abstract works and environmental installations. • moving to New York he has embarked on an ambitious series of installation works that stress the essential unity of human experience and community.

15. United Nations • In the United Nations series, GuWenda uses contributions of human hair to "weave" monumental banners of unreadable text in various scripts, with the intention of having one work in every country of the world. When he completes the project in 2003, he expects to have received hair donations from over a million people

16. United Nations

17. WendaGu's works explore the changing nature of world cultures in the face of globalisation. • Yet, despite their monumental scale, his art also refers directly to the individual. The use of genetic material personalises his installations, providing a reference point that focuses the viewer on the tenuous nature of cultural divides. • he artist's preoccupations with human interactions - across boundaries of race, gender and culture - are paramount in the works in this exhibition.

19. WendaGu's ongoing use of script within his work reflects the importance of language as a defining element of identity. • The artist's brilliant manipulations and combinations of real and composite scripts and sounds also raise issues of cross-cultural understanding and translatability. • Such themes resonate within his latest works, presented for the first time in Intersections & Translations.