Traditional Chinese landscape painting, through its depiction of mountain rock, flowing water and swirling air, renders the cosmological interplay of form and void. Sometimes a tiny presence intervenes, a house or a figure on a path that draws the eye, folding human activity into the larger dynamic. The outward marks of brush and ink reveal inward energies and harmonies. Sometimes the scene represents an actual place and time, more often it is part imaginary, contoured by pressures and coloured by speculations from within.
     Among the most famous of all Chinese paintings is the Qing Ming Shang He fu, a horizontal scroll from the Northern Song dynasty 1960-1127) attributed to Zhang Zeduan. Known in English as Life Along the River at the Pure Brightness Festival, the painting vividly depicts daily riverside life in China's then capital during the mid-spring festival when people customarily remember their ancestors. It is known for its thronging human, architectural and topographical detail. Nature and humanity, the myriad forms of life and their memorialising in art, combine here in a prolific, panoramic image. The word 'tu' in the title is the classical Chinese term for 'picture'. Yet it also means 'plan' or 'map' (as in modern Chinese 'ditu'). A painting such as Qing Ming Shang He Tu can be read as a kind of cosmography, a visual representation of boundless nature, human existence and the universal in spatial relationship.
     Guan Wei appropriates that ancestral masterpiece, now familiar in reproduction, as a starting point for his own work, Looking for Enemies (2004). He overlays the stylised surface of the traditional painting with graphics from a different code, the contemporary computer game, its icons drawn in turn from military software-invasive black cut-outs that contrast starkly with the background of refined life a thousand years ago. The idea is that if you look for enemies you will find them, bringing them into existence from your own projected fear and aggression. This can be taken as a reference to the 'war on terror', and perhaps more specifically to the mission of Western forces to smoke out the enemy from their traditional remote landscapes.
     Guan Wei plays satirically with the notion of mental mapping, by which human desire-like a pumped-up boy's adventure, armed with technology and the assertion of supremacy-reshapes the environment in a toxic way. It applies to the West, but might also apply to the East, the fake Song scene of refined cultural difference merely a thin veil over a dangerous will to power.
    

 In the history of cartography the mapping of the real has gone hand in hand with the imagining of the unreal. The cataloguing of the known has required projection into the unknown as boundaries are reached. West to East and vice versa, North to South. Australia is a spectacular example of this, an absence on a map that prompted fanciful and forceful attempts to fill in what was missing. Yet what was missing was there all along, only not to European eyes and not to Chinese eyes either, although Ming admiral Zheng He may have passed by six hundred years ago on his remarkable voyage. That is the subject of work by Guan Wei for a forthcoming exhibition at Sydney's Powerhouse Museum. Aboriginal and other indigenous stories, traced in song and pigment, produced different sorts of maps-another place where 'picture' was cosmography-of which outsiders had no idea. Developments in navigation, trade and colonisation had to reach a certain point before the territorial outline of the Australian continent could be drawn. The task was mostly completed with Matthew Flinders' celebrated circumnavigation in 1803. For this new domain to be added to the world's cartographical inventory, co-ordinates in time and space, history and geography, and the actions of key individuals, small in the grand scheme of things, heroic nonetheless-had to intersect in a marvellous way. That is what Guan Wei stages with wit and style in Unfamiliar Land (2006). This work in many panels takes the form of an anachronistic map -naive, illustrative, indicative, fantastical. It tells a tale of technology and empire, curiosity and aggression, expansion and encounter. It also suggests a greater cosmology where human actions are contained within larger, more elemental processes of creation and destruction. Through the use of silhouette, a favoured form of image-making in the age of empire, the artist renders fauna, flora and people as alike exotic and strange, as a child in another age might entertain them. The alarmed and belligerent encounters of boundary crossing between Europeans and indigenous peoples are seen with cheeky cartoon clarity. Desperate figures clinging to their sinking boats as sea monsters close in make the closer connection with the plight of recent refugees. The ancient drama of open waters, porous borders and disputed lands is also contemporary-Australia's border protection policy has the fangs of the fantastical shark that used to be put on maps to scare mariners.
Unfamiliar Land is accompanied by a wall painting on a similar theme, with boats and people, clouds, islands, fish and birds, produced expressly for the site by the artist and his assistant in the days preceding the exhibition and intended to be painted over at its conclusion. While it may allude to the great Chinese Buddhist heritage of mural painting, the wall painting subverts the aspiration to permanence in the manner of graffiti. It also contrasts with the collectability of the companion work on multiple, conveniently sized portable panels. The wall painting is transient and ephemeral. It is fugitive, like the lost world of Song dynasty painting, like the victims of conflict, like the drowned refugees.