a Han-Chinese version of the great imperial Manchu clan name of Gûwalgiya, or Gua'erjia.
     The artist, a man with the physical stature and particular accent of Beijing Chinese that is unique to the Manchus, comes from a long line not only of military nobles, but also imperial curators and custodians. His paternal great-grandfather was the comptroller of the Yihe Yuan, the luxurious Summer Palace constructed for the Empress Dowager Cixi at the end of last century; his great-great-aunt was taken into the imperial family, and gave birth to Aisin Gioro Puyi, or simply Henry Puyi, also known as the Xuantong Emperor, the last imperial ruler of China.
     Like so many old noble families, Guan's clan fell on hard times with the collapse of the Qing Dynasty in 1911, Lao She, China's most famous 20th Century Manchu novelist, depicted in his often humorous tales of old Beijing life the plangent fate of the Manchu Bannermen, nobles stripped of their wealth by imperial decline, war and personal decadence. Despite their fall from grace many Bannermen retained the tastes of dandies and enjoyed to the end the diversions and entertainments of the ancient imperial capital, Beijing. As Lao She observed in his famous family epic,  Four Generations Under One Roof:
     'In the last decades of the Qing dynasty, the life of the Bannermen, apart from consuming the grain and spending the silver supplied by the Chinese, was completely immersed, day to day, in the life of the arts.... Everybody knew how to sing arias from the classical opera... and chant the popular tunes of the day. They raised fish, birds, dogs,

Aisin Gioro Zaifeng, Grand Regent of the post - abdication Qing Court,photographed in the 1920's. Guan Wei's paternal great-uncle, father of Henry Puyi

plants and flowers, and held cricket fights, Among them were many with outstanding calligraphy, or some talent at landscape painting, or writing poetry of some kind.,,, They didn't have the strength to defend the borderlands or maintain their political power, but they developed a very intimate relationship with their pets and their culture.'¹
    While Guan Wei is not necessarily besotted with biological companions in real life, his painterly realm is home to all manner of exotic and whimsical creature; they fly, or used to, swim, walk, creep and carouse, On reflection, for this writer at least, the work in this exhibition hints at the artist's interweaving of his own fate with the broader global issue of limited bionomic resources and the vexing