Wenda Gu:
Forest of Stone Steles
Herbert F. Johnson Museum of Art
Wenda Gu
Forest of Stone Steles: Retranslation and Rewriting of Tang Poetry
1993-2005
12 carved slate steles and related ink rubbings
In all, Wenda Gu's ambitious undertaking, Forest of Stone Steles: Retranslation and Rewriting of Tang Poetry (conceived in 1993, executed 2000 - 2005), includes fifty slate monoliths and fifty indexical ink rubbings taken from their carved planes. There have been many different exhibitions of Forest of Stone Steles with varying numbers of sculptures and related rubbings presented. This changeability is important to the work as instability, shifting reception and indeterminacy play as themes throughout.
The twelve steles exhibited at Cornell University's Johnson Museum constitute this project's largest manifestation in the United States--remarkable since this Chinese-American artist calls New York City and Dutchess County home. Gu's situation in NYC poignantly mirrors corporate America's relationship with Chinese industry: as a designer and manager Gu hires Chinese scholars to make translations and Xi'an City artisans to execute the carving.
These works are modeled after steles in a Xi'an museum that preserves writing styles from antiquity to the twentieth century, and that through their permanence constitute a canon of Chinese calligraphy (an art form that was the most esteemed among all visual expressions). Gu's 1.3-ton steles, horizontally oriented like Chinese funerary markers, seem as dark slate benches arranged on an orderly grid. Corresponding ink rubbings from these stones hang framed on the gallery walls and refer to traditions of taking rubbings that become portable substitutes for the unmovable. The slabs' edges are carved with a dragon scale pattern that, along with the calligraphy, mark an ostensible Chineseness. Just as Gu himself has a fusion identity, he complicates the work's cultural character by showing a process of translating and transliterating Tang dynasty poems between Chinese and English. These poems authored by several writers are considered Chinese literary treasures on the order of Shakespeare to English or Goethe to German.
To summarize the slabs' content, the top starts with a presentation of the poem in Chinese characters; then an early twentieth-century English translation by Witter Byner; then a transliteration of each English sound to Mandarin (represented by the prominent calligraphy carved on each stone). These characters are then freely translated back to English. Lastly, Gu presents an English titling and an explanation of the process in Chinese characters. It is noteworthy that the layout forces a receptive repositioning as one must read the Chinese from one angle and the English from another.
With all the meaningful and indeterminate layers written into Tang poetry, Bynner's earnest translations must be understood as rewritings that miss many meanings. The transliteration offers an absurd reinvigoration of the original by creating cross-cultural "post-Tang" poems. Even the Chinese characters here are not straightforward since Gu invents his own structure and the recombination is not immediately legible. Gu hires cross-literate scholars to make "post-Tang" English translations that are humorous, dark and surrealist--a style that connotes free-associative word play and accidental aesthetics.
Despite the presentation of words immutably "written in stone" Gu proffers ideas made impermanent and destabilized by purposeful misconstructions. As markers of global hybridity, the monoliths show that cultural-exchange is inherently and inevitably first a misunderstanding. Perceiving that these ponderous monuments carry nonsense is to get the joke. To Gu's credit, the viewer remains fascinated in trying to understand the intrinsic comedy.William V. Ganis
Wenda Gu: Forest of Stone Steles is at Cornell University's Johnson Museum of Art from January 20 - March 14, 2007.