In 1989, three years after graduating from the Department of Fine Arts at Beijing Capital University, Guan Wei came to Australia to take up an artist-in-residence at the Tasmanian School of Art. He was invited to undertake two further residencies: one at the Museum of Contemporary Art in Sydney (1992), the other at the Canberra School of Art, Australian National University (1993). In 2003, he was artist in residence at the Greene Street Studio, New York, and Visiting Fellow at the Canberra School of Art, Australian National University, Canberra.
Guan Wei’s work has a profoundly felt, if implicitly ironic, moral dimension. In their complex symbolic form, his subjects potently embody our era’s social and environmental dilemmas. They are equally the product of his rich cultural repertory of symbols and his informed socio-political awareness, born of his experience of the contrasting realities of his former home, China and, since 1989, his new home, Australia.
Guan Wei has held over 40 solo exhibitions, including 'A Mysterious Land’, ARC One, Melbourne (2007), 'Unfamiliar Land’, CACSA (Contemporary Art Centre of South Australia) and 'Echo’, Sherman Galleries (both 2006). He has been included in numerous important contemporary exhibitions in Australia and internationally, such as the Third Asia-Pacific Triennial, Brisbane (1999); 'Man and Space’, Kwangju Biennale (2000); 'Face Up: Contemporary Art from Australia’, Hamburger Bahnhof Museum, Berlin (2003-04); and solo survey exhibitions, such as 'Other Histories: Guan Wei’s Fable for a Contemporary World’ at the Powerhouse Museum, Sydney (2006) and 'Nesting, or the Art of Idleness 1989-1999’, Museum of Contemporary Art, Sydney (1999).
Guan Wei has won several awards, including the 2002 Sir John Sulman Prize, Art Gallery of New South Wales, Sydney. In 2006 Craftsman House published a monograph on Guan Wei’s work, with essays by Dinah Dysart, Natalie King and Hou Hanru. His work is held in major public collections and numerous university and corporate collections in Australia, as well as international collections.
- Writers:
- Murray-Cree, Laura
- Date written:
- 2006
- Last updated:
- 2008
