The China Project

147 Three Decades: The Contemporary Chinese Collection GUAN Wei Guan Wei’s Echo 2005 has been described as exemplifying his ‘ongoing preoccupation with orientation, place, imaginary destinations and notions of discovery’. 1 Through these preoccupations, Guan Wei has navigated the rigours of political oppression and immigration, establishing an artistic career in a new homeland. In Echo , Guan Wei appropriates nine images from early books on European exploration of the Pacific Ocean in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. These images are reconstructed and grafted onto a famous Chinese landscape painting by Wang Yuanqi (1642–1715), a great Qing-dynasty scholar and artist, whose work is regarded as the highest aesthetic achievement of seventeenth- and eighteenth-century China. Guan Wei states that: [t]he aesthetic value of such a famous Chinese intellectual painting is the harmony between nature and humankind, as well as the abstract expression of the individual’s spiritual pursuits. However, when Captain Cook and his soldiers emerge from the wild seascape into such harmony, their courage and ambitious heroism is immediately swallowed and diminished. In fact, in such a scene, these historical European heroes become more like a group of brutal bandits. 2 In Echo , Guan Wei takes a fresh approach to traditional historical analysis. The work’s 42 panels, divided into three tiers of fourteen, designate different perspectival shifts within the narrative, moving from the backdrop of the scroll painting at the top to the European and Indigenous battle scenes in the lower tiers. We see Indigenous Australians with spears and shields, which was a ‘pictorial strategy used by colonial artists — and appropriated by Guan Wei — to designate non-Europeans as “others” and “primitives”’, 3 while in the foreground, soldiers are pointing and hold a red flag emblematic of communist China, suggesting territorial expansion. Guan Wei explains that ‘. . . by transposing historical images in a different aesthetic relationship and cultural context, the painting becomes more complicated and supernatural; it recharges our history with sublime and poetic characters’. 4 In this epic work, Guan Wei juxtaposes the ‘grand genre’ of European history painting of the seventeenth to nineteenth centuries with the equivalent aesthetic achievement of China during the same period — while China had become culturally introspective, Europe was aggressively expanding into other cultures through exploration and colonialism. Guan Wei’s quotation of Australian and Chinese historical documents in Echo casts it as a contemporary history painting about some of the most complex and troubling issues of the present, such as migration, conquest and reconciliation. Guan Wei’s use of a muted palette suggests ageing maps and historical, sepia-toned reproductions. He simultaneously draws the viewer’s attention to the contemporary meaning of the painting by inserting symbols such as telescopic weapon sights, which remind us of contemporary warfare, electronic camera viewfinders and other visual aids from computer imagery. Guan Wei uses these diverse elements in dialogue with each other to remind us that we are living in a time and place where cultures, technologies and races are much more integrated than in the past. The painting’s title suggests that the past continues to impact on the present but will, with time, diminish like a fading echo, allowing new voices to resonate into the future. endnotes 1 Natalie King, ‘Chinese whispers: The work of Guan Wei’, in Dinah Dysart et al (eds), Guan Wei , Craftsman House, Melbourne, 2006, p.56. 2 Guan Wei, Echo [exhibition catalogue], Sherman Galleries, Sydney, 2006, unpaginated. 3 King, p.56. 4 Guan Wei, Echo . Echo (details, and full image) 2005 Synthetic polymer paint on canvas / 42 panels: 273 x 722cm (overall) / Purchased 2006. The Queensland Government’s Gallery of Modern Art Acquisitions Fund