Wenda Gu is the most celebrated of a new generation of avant-garde artists who emerged from China in the very late 1980s and in the 1990s, as a result of the 'Open Door' policy that succeeded the chauvinism of the Cultural Revolution. Born in Shanghai, Wenda Gu received his initial training at the Shanghai School of Art and Craft, where he soon established a reputation as a troublesome student who wanted to go his own way. Later he attended the China National Academy of Art in Hangzhou, one of only five students accepted as the school was re-opening after the chaos of Mao's final years. Here he studied calligraphy and traditional Chinese ink-painting under Lu Yunshao, one of the last surviving heirs of the old Chinese literati tradition. At the same time he absorbed everything he could find about Western and Chinese philosophy, in addition to experimenting in private with Western art styles.

He says now that, while he was impatient then with the traditional training he received at Hangzhou, he is now grateful for the foundation it gave him. "Without this base," he says, "you don't really have anything to work against." He points out that very few Chinese artists of his generation received a training of this kind - most were trained instead in Western methods of making painting and sculpture.

His earliest independent art works, produced before he left China for the United States in 1987, made use of large scale ideograms. His first solo show was closed down by the authorities because it featured characters which were unreadable, though it was afterwards re-opened for a 'professional' audience. Wenda Gu says: "The fear was that there was a political message in the calligraphy, but there wasn't - I was just questioning the philosophy of language." At the same time, however, he does note a connection with the Cultural Revolution years - a link to the 'big character posters' produced at that time by young people, workers and farmers, none of whom had any formal training in calligraphy. "I consider [this to be] much livelier, more vital and contemporary than calligraphy by the masters... The farmers and workers involved in the Revolution did not consider what they were doiing as art, but if you look way their words had their own identity and creativity...These works were about passion too - the people believed in what they were writing." [quotation from an interview with Melissa Chiu in 'Orientations'].

In 1987 Wenda Gu left China for North America, settling in New York after brief periods spent in San Francisco and at York University near Toronto. There were two reasons for his departure. One was that there was at that time no avant-garde exhibition scene in China, and he did not want to have to continue living and working as a purely underground artist. The other was that he had been fascinated from the beginning by the idea of cultural diversity. He now maintains three studios - one in New York, and two others in China, one in Shanghai and one in X'ian. Some work has to be carried out in China in order to retain authenticity. This is true, for example, of one of the projects being shown in Singapore - the 'Forest of Stone Steles'. Here text is engraved on stone tablets, and China alone has the professional calligraphy carvers who can do this. The actual content of the work is nevertheless typically trans-cultural. The texts consist of Tang Dynasty poems, translated into English in the 1940s, by translators who looked for the meaning rather than the sound, and now re-translated into Chinese, based on the sound of the English. "The poems are still readable, but they're contemporary."

The other project on display is Wenda Gu's 'United Nations', an ambitious installation made of human hair. In fact 'United Nations', an enterprise that began in 1993, is not a single project, but a single idea that has led to a proliferating series of sub-projects. Eaxch is an installation made of human hair, which Wenda Gu collects, or has collected for him, all over the world. One reason for choosing hair is that it is very durable - the hair found on Ancient Egyptian mummies is still intact. Another is that it is both universal and very personal, in the sense that the merest fragment of hair from any individual carries his or her DNA - that person's unique genetic code. There is also the belief, prevalent among Native Americans, but also found in the Bible, in the story of Samson, that hair is a repository of physical power. In sophisticated societies, both ancient and modern, elaborate hair-styles were, and continue to be, a sign of status.

This marked symbolic value may be one reason why the 'United Nations' project has sometimes proved to be very controversial. For example, both in Israel and in Poland it aroused memories of the Holocaust - because, during the Holocaust, Jewish women had their hair cut off before being sent to the gas chambers.

However, Wenda Gu points out that the mythology and symbolism of hair is much broader based than this. "Punk or hippie, people cut their hair according to their political stance - you see these white supremacists shave their hair, for example." There is also the notion that hair is something which is both 'abject', in the sense the French philosopher Georges Bataille gave to that word, and at the same time inherently noble. It is abject because, when it is cut off, it becomes a form of bodily waste, something unclean. Wendu Gu sometimes has trouble importing it through customs. What he does, the structures he makes, restore its original nobility.

Wenda Gu's installations made from hair have quite a close relationship to traditional Chinese architecture. Similarly, his inscriptions, even when the characters are subverted, still retain their kinship to the Chinese use of ideograms. In their earliest form, some of these ideograms may date to five thousand years before the Christian era - new archaeological discoveries in China keep pushing them yet further back into the past. His work is therefore both universal in its ambitions and deeply rooted in the Chinese literati culture that he once wanted to reject. The revival of the literati sensibility is having an increasing effect on Chinese avant-garde art, not least because it links so easily and naturally with Western Conceptual ideas.

Wenda Gu was the pioneer of this development. He is also the first Chinese-born artist, working since the end of the Cultural Revolution, to have made himself into a fully international figure. In more senses than one, he is a key figure in the culture of our time.