"I love it," said Kesaya Noda, a college employee. "The only pattern is the pattern of color. There's no pattern to the way the medallions are hung and somehow this big spaghetti pile — that's a very powerful part of it to me. It's much more complex because he has this here. It's as though all our fortunes are enmeshed, and yet if you untangle it and were to make one string, you'd see that we're all separate. So it gives me an experience of being in the world. It gives me so much to think about."

Gu was born and raised in Mao-era Communist China and came of age during the Cultural Revolution. In the 1980s, he put on his first solo show in China — an installation of massive ink brush paintings of made-up Chinese characters. The paintings caught the attention of officials in the government's Propaganda Department.

"They were puzzled by unreadable characters. They thought about some hidden meaning behind it," Gu said in an interview from Shanghai, China.

Life under an oppressive regime taught him to welcome a range of reactions to his artwork.

"I feel the more diverse, the better," he said. "I don't want (it to be) just like a Cultural Revolution. Mao wishes one million people to have one brain, one thought, which is his thought. That's Mao's ambition. ... I want to have different opinions."

Gu moved to the United States in 1987 and these days divides his time between Brooklyn and Shanghai. Hair isn't the only human material with which he's worked. A 1993 series, "oedipus refound," used powdered human placenta (a traditional Chinese medicine), blood and semen. He said he chose human hair for "united nations" to break from conventional materials and to bring people closer to his work; over the years, 4 million people have donated hair to installations in the United States, Canada, Australia, Hong Kong, Taiwan, Israel and several European countries.

"I had kind of an ambition to try to bring all people together for my work, so it's kind of an age-of-utopia idea (to) try to unify ... mankind," he said. He acknowledged that the world has become more splintered since the project began.

The installations are on display at Baker-Berry Library until Sept. 9. Another Gu exhibit, "Retranslating and Rewriting Tang Dynasty Poetry," a collection of prints of translated Chinese poetry and their carved cases, is at the Hood Museum of Art until Sept. 9.