China Monument: Temple of Heaven "inside out", ps1 contemporary art center, new york city, usa, 1998

In the piece, China Monument: Temple of Heaven, Wenda Gu builds a home for the self in a global era out of hair and language. Through his installation of scroll-like hair walls, Gu explores the increasingly complex relationship between the sense of self and the sense of place in a global community. The China Monument: Temple of Heaven is one part of an on-going project, the united nations series in which Gu reconstructs the definitions of the self and the global home by relocating the subject, expanding the collective narrative and transforming languages of signification. In the Temple of Heaven, Gu utilizes abjection to situate the viewer in a liminal space— neither interior nor exterior, psychological nor physical, familiar nor disorienting. With the dissolution of these dualities, the boundaries of the self and place become permeable.

Wenda Gu’s curtains of hair in the China Monument: Temple of Heaven disrupt the viewer’s bodily boundaries upon entering the installation. The effect of the bodily materials in the installation provokes a discussion of Gu’s work in relationship to Julia Kristeva’s theory of abjection. In the China Monument, similar to other works in the united nations series, the body is referenced through the use of hair spun into walls, bricks, carpets, and ceilings used to define the installation space. Art theorists, when discussing other contemporary artists whose work references the body, such as Kiki Smith and Mike Kelley, have used Kristeva’s theory of abjection developed in her book Powers of Horror from 1980. Based on a form of non-Freudian psychoanalysis, Kristeva argues that hair may be defined as abject because it consists of dead cells outside the traditional boundaries of the body, similar to blood or nails; yet, these bodily substances are also formed within the body. Kristeva defines abject in Powers of Horror, as “something rejected from which one does not part.” 1 The abject is between subject and object, hence rupturing the traditional boundaries of the body. Kristeva’s description of abjection relates to Gu’s discussion of his hairy art works between subject and object. As Gu states, “They [the works] are the antithesis of the art as objects . . . they are as real as the people who look at them.” 2 The towering hair walls created for the Temple of Heaven installation utilize the unsettling nature of abjection, as a bodily substance that is both repellant and alluring, to dislocate the viewer.

Although the concept of a “primal” nature has been used by Western theorists to subjugate the “Other,” Wenda Gu’s art works and Kristeva’s theories suggest the potential in “primal” or abject substances for breaking down the boundaries of the body and the self. Kristeva argues that the abject challenges the Freudian limits of the body by referencing the pre-Oedipal point before the individual is constructed through language as subject or object.3 According to Kristeva, the “primal” substances of hair and blood symbolize a point in time when the individual and the mother were inseparable. In this stage of development, the boundaries of the subject are not clearly defined, since the mother has not been constructed as object and “Other” through language. 4 This aspect of Kristeva’s theory of abjection is particularly relevant to Gu’s work, since he describes his artistic focus as “the human body and its primal substance.”5 Both the use of hair as a medium, and the weaving of language into the hair walls, creates a place for the “primal” self before the formation of the subject through language. The primal substance or abject substance also suggests a previously existing unity between the human being and nature before construction of the subject. This resonates with the use of hair in Gu’s work as a representation of a landscape of rivers or veins. 6 The ability of abject substances like hair to reference the condition before the creation of the subject implies, according to Kristeva, that the artist’s goal is to reveal the abject or the “primal substance” in order to challenge the subjecthood of the viewer:

The effect of the dislocation of the subject in Wenda Gu’s Temple of Heaven is the collapse of the “Other” establishing a new collective experience within the installation space: “the separation and opposition between the subject and object melts in the shared experience of the viewers.” 8 The dissolution of the cultural constructed subject is furthered through the alteration of language.

Wenda Gu’s use of language also resonates with Julia Kristeva’s critique of the role of language in constructing the self in a Freudian model. In opposition to Freud and Lacan, the text in Wenda Gu’s Temple of Heaven transforms the individual who reads the words into neither subject nor “Other.” For instance, in Gu’s installation for the China Monument: Temple of Heaven, he sews into the hair walls four separate pseudo-languages derived from English, Arabic, Hindi and Chinese. The words appear from a distance as though they could be read; yet, up close the words are nonsensical. As Gu stated in an interview, “Chinese readers could interpret the concept of an unreadable language as the mythos of a lost history, while non-Chinese readers could interpret it as a misunderstanding of an "exotic" culture.” 9 Since the words and the hair function in Gu’s installations as simultaneously recognizable and undecipherable, the experience of viewing the Temple of Heaven removes the subject from the traditional modes of constructing individual identity through the boundaries of the body and the limits of language.

The hair and pseudo-language that form the central structure of Wenda Gu’s China Monument: Temple of Heaven represent the conflict between the fragmented subject and the collective whole. For example, the hair collected by the artist to build the monuments intensifies the viewer’s relationship to the abject by reinforcing feelings of connection to a larger whole, while at the same time, causing the viewer to be repulsed by the breakdown of their own bodily boundaries. Gu describes the viewer’s experience of the space: “the overall reactions to this work range from severe ‘repulsion’ and ‘disgust’ to puzzling queries, then ultimate recognition—it is us.” 10 Similarly, the pseudo-language braided into the hair walls disrupts the individual narrative, as well as the nation’s collective history. The use of language to frame national identity has been particularly evident in Chinese history, as artist Xu Bing described in an interview with Gu and art historian Jonathan Hay: the written language taught in school during the cultural revolution of Mao was constantly changing based on the rhetoric of the leadership.11 Gu articulates a similar association between politics, language, and national identity:

For the Temple of Heaven, Gu selected specific types of texts, such as the ancient Chinese seal script, only to render them illegible in order to reveal the connection of language and national identity. For example, Gu explains the ancient seal script is illegible to most contemporary Chinese, as well as an international audience, which creates equality and, perhaps, unity between individuals from both cultures within the installation. Wenda Gu suggests that the limits of language must be transcended in order to communicate in a global era; as he explains, “the pseudo-languages help us to imagine a universe beyond language.” 13

In the installation of the Temple of Heaven, beneath the ceiling of hair inscribed with illegible text, is a table with twelve chairs fashioned in the Ming dynasty style. This set of table and chairs suggests the potential to transform the space into a place or even a home; juxtaposing the local, as represented by the table, with the global, as represented by the text within the hair walls. This installation creates a home for the self with out boundaries as indicated by the transparency of the hair walls, which prevent the space from becoming either interior or exterior. In addition to the hair curtains, embedded in each of the twelve chairs is a video screen reflecting a vision of the sky, yet the interior wires of the screen remain exposed in clear cases. This transparency reaffirms Gu’s articulation of the space as symbolic psychological territory for the fluid self in a global age. Gu’s installation makes us aware that the individual narratives that construct our identities are performed through language; thus, for the individual living in several cultures in a global community such as Gu, one’s identity is constantly being reconfigured. Kristeva argues in the Powers of Horror that those who recognize abjection are exiles, constantly dejected from society, neither a part of nor separated from themselves or others. As she writes, “A deviser of territories, languages, works, the deject never stops demarcating his universe whose fluid confines—for they are constituted by the non-object—the abject —constantly question his solidarity and impel him to start afresh.” 14 Gu’s role in the building of the China Monument is complicated by Kristeva’s theory, for he not only utilizes abjection in the piece, but he also acted in this dual role as both a cultural insider and outsider by installing the China Monument: Temple of Heaven for the first time in the exhibition Inside Out: New Chinese Art at P.S.1 Contemporary Art Center in New York during 1998. Projected into Kristeva’s role of the “deject,” Gu is constantly rebuilding a home with abject walls in new nations until his vision of the united nations series is realized.

The Temple of Heaven is a place to consider the existence of a global order, without abandoning personal memory and national identity. As critic Lucy Lippard defines place in a multi-centered world, “space defines landscape, where space combined with memory define place.” 15 The memory of a nation’s history and the memory of an individual’s experience are both represented in Wenda Gu’s monuments for the united nations series: the composition of each installation is determined by the historical events which define that country and the local people who donate the materials to build the monument. As Gu said, “I try to close the gap between the artwork and the audience by ensuring direct physical contact, interaction, and dialogue with the local population through the collection of the hair and reference to the cultural histories from which the monument will be created.” 16 At the same time, the spaces that Gu creates of hair and language ask the viewer to examine the possibility of a new place or a new home. A place in which a nation’s history is a building block, literally a block made of hair, in the transcendence towards a global order. The Temple of Heaven reveals Gu’s definition of globalism, in which national history and also personal history are building blocks for a world order as the boundaries of language, subjecthood, and the body are expanded to encompass the “Other.” Gu argues with the tools of hair and text that a global culture, or a place for a new global culture to exist within, defies current methods of constructing the subject through limits of the body and language. Through his monumental works, the ultimate message of Wenda Gu’s China Monument: Temple of Heaven is to root one’s self in a place, without establishing a fixed identity.