Gu Wenda is most well known for his use of pseudo-languages in most of his works. Ever since the exhibition of Chinese Painting Invitational in Wuhan City in 1984, Gu's large scale ink paintings have been increasingly exhibited. His first personal exhibition was closed by the authorities to public audiences before the opening because of the invented, fake, miswritten Chinese characters, and printing style calligraphy. After investigation it reopened only to the professional art circuit. The works from this show are regarded as the beginning of conceptual ink art in china.

In his work Temple of Heaven, he covers the room with ancient Chinese seal script: the oldest written form of the Chinese language, which most people can no longer speak. In other works he develops various unreadable texts based on language influences in the area in which he is creating an installment. Gu states that the unreadable texts are used to evoke the limitations of human knowledge. In his poster for the Cultural Revolution, Gu's use of miswritten, deformed, or crossed letters signifies the meaninglessness of the written word and the futility of human endeavor in a communist society.

United Nations Project
Gu Wenda began his fifteen-year ongoing global art project in 1993. The United Nations Project is a series of installations that involves the use of human hair and cryptic calligraphy to convey a meaning of "Internationalism." He has completed 21 total projects and sub-projects and more than one million people have contributed their hair to this art project. Gu Wenda refers to his installations as national monuments and human hair was collected from people of many different races and glued together to symbolize the diversity of races coming together and fusing humanity into “a brave new racial identity.” The characters that Gu uses are often old characters from an ancient Chinese dialect or a fusion of the native language in which the installation resides with Chinese characters. Gu's use of these symbols are meant to symbolize fragmentation of communication and human disconnect caused by language and culture. The use of hair from all different races either glued together to fashion a curtain or braided symbolizes the biological interconnectedness of human kind and Gu's optimism towards achieving true "Internationalism."

On his website Gu states: 'During its more than ten year length, United Nations art project will travel throughout five continents, in approximately twenty different countries which I have selected due to their historical, civilization and political importance. By utilizing the real hair of the local living population, i'm strongly relating to their historical and cultural contexts, to create monumental installations and land arts to capture each country's identity, building on profound events in each country's history. These individual installations are national monuments to the whole art project of United Nations. The notions such as transculturalism, transnationalism, hybridization are goals of the final ceremony of the project. In a few years into twenty-first century, a giant wall will be composed solely from the pure human hair from the integration of the national monument events. The human hair woven world pseudo-languages co-existing on the wall.'