Art as cultural diplomacy

q&a Wenda Gu is one of China's most celebrated conceptual artists. He works on a grand scale, often using human hair and traditional Chinese materials.

"I involve real people in my work," says the Chinese conceptual artist Wenda Gu.

Wenda Gu is one of China's most celebrated conceptual artists. He works on a grand scale, often using human hair and traditional Chinese materials. He spoke about his art project entitled United Nations at a seminar organised by Canvas magazine during artparis Abu Dhabi.

It's not a project that belongs to the United Nations. It's the title of my work. This work has been going for around 14 years. Basically, we use hair collected from different countries to make art. I involve real people in my work. I use human hair to make sculptures, installations, paintings and screens.

First of all, I really have an ambition to bring real people into my work instead of just to draw an image. You know? I want real essential material from different races and different cultures in my work. And the second reason is that the world is very divided instead of united. A utopia is very difficult to realise in the real world, but it can be perfectly viewed in this artwork. Thirdly, a lot of people talk about this millennium as kind of a biological millennium, based upon modern genetics research. This is my approach, to try to reflect human progress and development through art.

I think both. Maybe it's not surprising in the art world but it always surprises the general public. In one particular project I did for Dartmouth College I made one single braid 12 kilometres long to build a hair temple, dyed into 12 colours. So it looks really beautiful.

I have a new project called Heavenly Lantern. You know the Chinese lantern, right? It's used as a celebration for special occasions such as weddings. I used these lanterns to cover landmarks in different cities. The first is actually still in the process of being realised in Rotterdam in the Netherlands. It's a kind of a large effort to collaborate with the city government and the general public.

The Chinese lantern is about celebration. It's an icon of festivity. It has fewer social and political implications. When I started to do the United Nations project I used hair to unite people. Some critics would say, "Wenda Gu's project is culturally colonialist because he uses this hair." For instance, for a monument in Poland, the local museum collected hair from local barbershops, so it was all Polish hair. And this work was built by a pair of Chinese hands, so it has these implications of colonising or whatever. But it's a sense of cultural colonialism, not from bombs or war. I want my work to be a kind of cultural ambassador from one country to another.

China's contemporary art is not mature. It started from the early 1980s. Before that, China was totally isolated from the West. I do feel that China's contemporary art has a future and it has potential, but I feel it's immature because of its short history.

It's kind of a commercial thing. It's very good, I think, especially for Abu Dhabi and the United Arab Emirates. The event has both sides: the lectures are more about the theory and the literature, and the fair itself is more about the marketing and the commercial.

Contemporary art in both China and Abu Dhabi are new. And they both share fast-growing economies. I mean, Dubai is an astounding city. If you compare it to Beijing or Shanghai, it's probably kind of a world-renowned image today, with all these unbelievable skyscrapers. So I think both cities share a similar character.