Boundaries disappear on Guan Wei’s journey into fantasy realms
Weaving past, present and future into a vibrant yet unpredictable world, Guan Wei’s journey to the west unfurls with a message of optimism.
Guan Wei’s journey to the west has never been one way. Born in China in 1957, Guan travelled to Australia from Beijing for a residency in 1989. It was shortly after the Tiananmen Square massacre.
He returned to Australia in 1990, becoming an Australian citizen in 1993. Yet China continues to attract him. Most years, he lives between Sydney and Beijing, despite more than one eviction from his Beijing studio at the hands of Chinese authorities.
Guan’s work has been celebrated in Australia and all over the world. With more than 70 solo exhibitions under his belt, Journey to the West is his first outing with Jan Manton Art at Teneriffe in Brisbane.
He’s no stranger, however, to local audiences, having shown with Heiser Gallery (2014, 2016) and at Queensland Art Gallery for the 3rd Asia-Pacific Triennial in 1999 and in many of the gallery’s collection-based shows. He has also had two major surveys at Sydney’s Museum of Contemporary Art (1999, 2019).
In his contemporary interpretation of the history painting tradition, Guan has explored subjects ranging from mythical and historical imaginings to the difficulties for displaced peoples.
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His work holds an appealing personal symbolism, while explorations of the social, political and environmental times in which we live are also integral. Even as his mythological stories offer a level of escapism, they engage with the present.
‘Artificial Intelligence now mirrors the kaleidoscopic cosmos envisioned in Indian and Chinese Buddhist traditions’
His current Brisbane exhibition Journey to the West includes a playful series of editioned sculptures in bronze, in which his “everyman”, a stylised oriental figure, engages with a cloud. The
series for which the exhibition is named is a major multi-panel seascape based on the Chinese myth of Sun Wukong (the monkey king) who embarks on an odyssey to retrieve Buddhist scriptures. Yet the monkey king’s encounters with demons, angels and monsters are also populated by modern technologies.
“In this era of advancing AI technology, the boundary between virtual and reality has been completely dissolved,” says Guan. “Artificial Intelligence now mirrors the kaleidoscopic cosmos envisioned in Indian and Chinese Buddhist traditions. It weaves together past, present and future into a vibrant, unpredictable and endlessly fascinating world.”
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The narrative is held together over eight panels with a stylised seascape that fades to the horizon, a cloud shifting across the surface and a enigmatically gestural hand. Characters include the
monkey king, Vishnu with myriad hands, a dark shadow that becomes a snake, alien-looking figures, a unicorn and creatures of the sea. The final panel features the victorious Buddha, expression sanguine as the devil figure retreats to the heavens and Vishnu’s hands hold aloft divine power.
Guan Wei’s 13-panel artwork, Newborn, 2024.
Artificial intelligence is also evoked in Newborn, an even more ambitious 13-panel assembly that fuses the dakini figures of Buddhist Tantric traditions with robots to “envision a future that is not
predetermined but is, instead, created”.
In this painting is a plea for sustainability and a reimagining of a future “beyond technological utopias”. Time is represented as a “wormhole”, connections spiralling between memory, the past and the future. Aliens and spacecraft are conjoined to industrial elements, skulls, humans and the natural world, surrounded by Guan’s scalloped representations of the sea and sky.
His final series within the exhibition is As Myth Has It. Central panels feature islands – a map of the South Seas; a group of islands depicted as a seascape, overwritten with navigational plot lines. Islands are used as symbols of exploration and discovery but also places of fantasy, imaginings and utopias. Their layering of exotic flora and fauna over faces of 17th and 18th century human figures speaks to the conflict between nature and culture that has come to define our age.
In this exhibition, Guan builds fantastical narratives from cultural references, dreams and memories, within his speculation about potential futures. Despite the pace of change and uncertainty about what lies ahead, he is optimistic: ‘The future holds boundless possibilities.”
Journey to the West: Guan Wei is on show at Jan Manton Art, Teneriffe, June 3-21.