Gu Wenda

Gu Wenda is thoroughly trained in the traditional art arts of ink painting and calligraphy, as such, he is uniquely poised to challenge it from within. In 1985, one of Gu’s earliest series works, Mythos of Lost Dynasties Series – Tranquility Comes from Meditation, stood out in the ‘Invitational Exhibition on New Works of Chinese Painting’ in Wuhan. The large scale and provocative contextual of his series stroke huge attention. The series was often subverted by being modified and miswritten as he executed different techniques and created different script types by whether combining them or inventing new ideographs. It was a new approach to differ himself from the classic traditional writing and painting.

The full ideograph in one of his work shown in Fig. 8 is unreadable. His self-invented-word was a combination of the character Shen (神) and Chang (畅) with Shen (申) acting as the central vertical element, bisecting the composition. His error-word calligraphy can be translated as ‘unobstructed spirit’. By doing so, he sent out a powerful message to go beyond or escape the cultural stereotypes. According to him, illegible script is more creative, illusionary and imaginative. Gu’s pseudo-characters are obvious explorations of an irrational world of images and emotions that can be visualized but not expressed through words alone. He proclaims that his primary motivation was to challenge and redirect the traditional painting and calligraphy. The featured characters hovering above or within the surreal landscapes later became his foundation or pattern for his future works which stands firmly in the modern contemporary art society.

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