PICK OF THE WEEK:: From our Nov/Dec issue: Gu Wenda
ArtAsiaPacific
Just six minutes into our breakfast conversation mid-May in Hong Kong, Gu Wenda described himself as a “troublemaker,” who “didn’t follow school requirements—even as a teacher.” I’d expected as much from an artist who made his name outside of China beginning in the late 1980s with massive installations incorporating human hair and, for a notorious (but brief) period, using menstrual blood, placenta powder and even semen. Yet, as the amicable, bespectacled Gu revealed in our conversation, instead of repudiating the august history of Chinese art, he has spent the last four decades pursuing new ways of interpreting these literatitraditions: an iconoclast infatuated with icons.
ArtAsiaPacific
