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 Like small fables, each scene discloses a vignette of life in action, replete with contrary tendencies and possibilities. In a vein of contemporary pantomime, Guan Wei details how complex the quest for social coherence has become for multicultural citizens of the world, In a hyper-realm of instant choice and infinite combinations.  
     The beverages are polychrome and appealing. One drink cunningly sports a yin/yang swizzle-stick; others are accompanied by powders, seeds or the ubiquitous soluble capsules of instantaneous social alchemy. However a closer inspection hints at ambiguous contents and effects. Perhaps delightful, perhaps noxious; perhaps medicinal perhaps narcotic; perhaps beneficial, perhaps lethal; age-old and new-age; a panoply of contrasting rituals and remedies is animated in a collage of cultural attitudes to the body and psychic well-being.
The middle series of works in the present exhibition perhaps establishes most sharply the varied operations in play, raising complex questions of interpretation, Guan Wei recomposes the exotic symbolic machinery of The Lost Supper with a radical aeration of meaning. He treats the subject with the starkly reversing truth of its strangeness to his own cultural heritage, Like a curious reader of fanciful tales enacted in strange cultural landscapes, he paraphrases the synoptic scene of Christ's impending betrayal among his disciples as a series of isolated episodes, Leonardo da Vinci's work in Milan has actually been studied by the artist in an available monograph; however any close comparison with the hallowed Renaissance archetype could only dramatise difference.
     Ironically aware of contrary conventions, Guan Wei voids the Christian subject of its spiritual density and iconographical complexity. In place of a resonant space suffused with presence and portent he represents his seated characters in reduced depth as a panel of independent performers. Instead of a machinery of intricate psychological implication the relationship between Guan Wei's characters is purely formal. Each gesticulates in a shallow booth of space, his halo secularised as a yellow discus, in front of him on the table is not the sacramental meal of the Eucharist but a wondrous modem concoction. The action, too, is suffused with cultural creole. Christ's gesture is partly that of a graceful Bodhisattva; part deal-clincher: Judas calls the police.
     However the visual dexterities employed also recall court-style nuance and refinement. Every figure is delineated by Guan Wei within a lively elegant silhouette, Each is caught in an individuating pose, servicing an allegorical contrast of human gesture.