What is 13 feet tall, 80 feet wide and covered in hair?
Give up?
It's Chinese artist Wenda Gu's newest project.
Dartmouth College has commissioned Gu to create an installation made up of human hair.
Yes, human hair.
New Hampshire Public Radio's Dan Gorenstein has this report on how the project is going.
These free haircuts result in additional material for Wenda Gu's art. (Cheryl Senter, NHPR)
Wenda Gu has been creating monument-sized sculptures out of human hair since 1993.
His hair pieces-called the United Nations Series- have appeared in 20 countries on five continents.
Why human hair?
Gu’s answer is multi-layered..
For one, the artist says, the material grabs your attention.
"When the audience walks into my art work, they feel the people... instead of a piece of metal, or canvass or stone."
Gu is also big on participation.
Over the years, he has knit his colossal screens and banners from the hair of over 4 million people across the globe.
Brian Kennedy, director of Dartmouth's art museum says Gu work has a political message.
"hair of different colors, different race and different gender. But all mixed so you wouldn't know one from the other. And we are all the same. It's a comment on our universality as humans."
Juliette Bianco is all for universality.
But the Assistant Museum Director wasn't thrilled when she got the job to collect all the curls, locks, dreads, ponytails, fros, bangs and braids for Gu's project.
"I tend to be a neatnik. I am always cleaning. I like order, and just a clean person. The fact that I would be collecting hair is very strange."
Bianco spent a good portion of her year driving to Split Ends, the Hair Affair, the Hair Shed and other spots in the Upper Valley to pick up donated clippings.
"one salon collected all their hair in a box...but then I had to put it in a bag. When I dumped it out, and looked in the bag the hair had stayed in the shape of the box. And that was a little bit creepy. Something about a boxed shaped clump of hair sitting in front of you with edges and corners."
"Did you have to break it up with your hands?"
"No. it grossed me out just a tiny bit. I just mushed it in the bag. ….. (how did you do that) I folded it over and just went like that, without looking. And it was fine.....(laughter) I have to say now, when I find a piece of hair on my desk I wonder if it's mine. (laughter)"
Some volunteers have come back multiple times to donate hair to Gu's artwork. (Cheryl Senter, NHPR)
One day Bianco held her breath and stared into one of her 45 gallon bags of hair.
And Gu’s work began to click for her.
"I the colors swirled together, I saw the art. ….. I saw the art in the hair. I saw the beauty, the softness and I was one step closer to imagining the final project."
By autumn, Bianco estimates she sent hair from more than 14 thousand hair cuts—that’s over 400 lbs—across the world to Gu’s studio in Shanghai.
Bianco says the project's 13 by 80 foot panels will be made completely of hair from the Upper Valley.
On those panels, Gu plans to embroider words using Chinese and Indian hair he has dyed neon green.
He will then attach a single braid that stretches several miles long and is dyed pink, purple, blue and orange.
At its heart, Gu's optimistic work intends to show how we are all bound together.
That's why New England School of Hair Design's Sarah Mitiguy offered her hair to the project.
"I am a person who hasn't traveled much. To be joined with someone... way across the world that I might never meet. That is amazing to me that that can be accomplished. That a piece of me will be with someone on the other side of the world."
Gu’s exhibit is scheduled to be unveiled at the Baker Library at Dartmouth in early June.
For NHPR News, I'm Dan Gorenstein.
