Hair. Hair, hair. Hair, hair, hair. More hair than Wenda Gu could use, much more. 42,000 haircuts. 430 pounds of hair shipped to Shanghai, and some of it mixed with other hair from around the world, and returned to New Hampshire. Hair shaped and kept in place by Elmer's glue, suspended in panels, hung from the ceiling and brightened by window light.

Or cleaned, bleached and dyed hair, a thin seven-mile braid rising from a coiled pool of more hair, a multicolored curtain of hair dangled along both sides of a long corridor. And at intervals along the braid, stainless-steel tags naming the 194 countries of the world in alphabetical order, but with backward spelling so that Ailognom and Ailartsua and Aivilob are neighbors and Maug lifts the beholder's lips into a grin.

Ah, the beholder. What is the beholder to make of Wenda Gu's new artwork at Dartmouth College's Baker Library?

Well, that is a problem. Or, not a problem but a challenge. How much context do you want? How much should the ideas behind the art matter? How much do you need to know about Wenda Gu? Shouldn't it just be you and the art?

But who are you? Does the idea of artwork made of hair give you the creeps? Does it make you think of Auschwitz? Does it remind you of the lost hair of cancer patients? Is it dirty, greasy hair, icky to the touch? Or can you block or transcend such thoughts?

Maybe the place to start is downstairs at the Baker, where in 1932 José Clemente Orozco began the last major site-specific artwork commissioned at

the college, a 24-panel mural titled "The Epic of American Civilization." This is a colorful but arresting interpretation of centuries of cultural clash, ethnic and class struggle and social oppression in the Americas. Or it seems to be.

Orozco called his mural an "epic" but insisted that its "stories and other literary associations exist only in the mind of the spectator, the painting acting as the stimulus." For example, someone looking at a battle scene "may start thinking of murder, another of pacifism, another of anatomy, another of history, and so on." Behind a work of art, Orozco wrote, "there is always an IDEA, never a STORY."

A trait we share

So, back upstairs, three-quarters of a century later, you can look at "the green house" and "united colors," the latest works in Wenda Gu's 15-year "united nations" project, and see what you can see. Or, if you prefer context, you can consider some of what Wenda Gu himself has said about his ideas and what Brian Kennedy, the director of the Hood Museum, has concluded from his study of the artist and his art.

The story behind the work is straightforward, if strange. Haircuts are about how customers look afterward, not about the hair left on the floor. But to Wenda Gu, hair is a global common denominator. We humans all, or almost all, have hair, and conspicuously so. It has DNA. It carries our genetic markers. In a world that is at once globalizing and fracturing, Wenda Gu makes art out of a material that humankind shares.

The hair in the installations at Dartmouth came from the floors of local barber shops and salons and from on-campus haircut events. Wenda Gu and his many helpers mixed this hair with other hair to create the "united nations" pieces. Some of the leftover Hanover hair will go in future projects in the series.

When you walk into the Baker Library, "the green house," an 80-by-13-foot hair screen, hangs before you. Across its expanse, in green capital letters, Wenda Gu superimposed one 10-letter word over another: "advertises" and "educations." What is he telling us? Perhaps to be careful about taking things at face value. Maybe the clumsiness of "educations" says something about his distrust of language.

Wenda Gu, 52, now lives in a Brooklyn brownstone and runs an international, multi-studio art enterprise, but he is also the son of a member of the Chinese Communist Party. Three of his grandparents were sent to the countryside to be "re-educated" during the Cultural Revolution, a period of extreme reaction in China.

As a young man, Wenda Gu became a member of the Red Guard and spent time making propaganda posters. He is a trained calligrapher who decided that language and culture fail to unify people and nations because something is always lost or altered in the translation.

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