Looking for Enemies

  This is the first postmodern conflict, because we are definitely at war but we don't know who the enemy is... Chris Shepherd, journalist¹
  Guan Wei arrived in New York on 14 August 2003, the day the lights went out in cities across the eastern United States and Canada. Although the outage was quickly identified as a major power failure, and not an act of terror, the edginess of that day affected GuanWei's three-month residency in New York.Looking, his exhibition at Greene St Studio, began a series of fractured, fictional narratives dealing with the war on terror. Disturbing, yet not unrelieved by Guan Wei's whimsical humour and lightness of touch, these works include murals, paintings, works on paper, objects and artist's books.
  Not since his boyhood in Beijing has Guan Wei so indulged his passion for sketching soldiers and war games. His childhood drawings were inspired byChina's Cold War propaganda paintings directed against America and the Soviet Union. His current sketchbooks are filled with silhouettes of soldiers, rifles, tanks, ground-to-air missiles, battleships, submarines, stealth bombers, transport planes and parachutists falling to earth like dandelion seeds. More detailed drawings marshal these disparate elements into intricate maps of territorial invasions, with names,

Target 2004 acrylic on canvas, 20 panels, 267 x 563 cm overall photographer: Sue Blackburn courtesy the artist and Sherman Galleries, Sydney

 markers, signs, symbols, sites of explosions, disembodied balaclavas and people taking flight in small boats. The drawings reveal Guan Wei' sfascination with Western topographical maps and graphics, mediated information flows, constructed histories and geographies, computer games and the use of signs as metaphysical content.
  Transferred to a series of multi-panelled paintings and collectively titled Looking for Enemies, Guan Wei's invasion scenarios assume a much more sinister approximation of reality, despite their obvious playful qualities. The artist's depiction (albeit fictive) of our landmass being invaded by the black battalions of war is disconcerting, especially as the artist's trademark pink figures cast us, the Australian inhabitants, as refugees, scrambling for safety in Gallipoli-style attempts at evacuation.