Journey to the West, an exhibition of recent works by Beijing-born artist Guan Wei, draws its title from Wu Cheng’en’s classic Ming Dynasty text. Wu’s fable recounts the trials and misadventures of Sun Wukong, the Monkey King, in his quest to recover sacred Buddhist scriptures and regain favour after his expulsion from the Heavens. Throughout this journey, Sun Wukong uses his mischief, wiles, and magic to navigate encounters with a motley assortment of beings who either help or hinder his progress. Guan Wei’s work in this exhibition is evocative of this trickster archetype: the artist himself serves as a mischievous figure guiding us through a fantastical world as he constructs a new fable for the present and future.
Guan Wei is a prolific artist. His work has featured in over 80 Australian and international exhibitions, and I was excited to view selections from recent bodies of work in Brisbane in the intimate setting of Jan Manton Gallery. Guan Wei’s series Journey to the West (2025), As Myth Has it (2022), and Newborn (2024) each occupied a single wall. In the centre of the gallery, displayed on plinths, were three white-enamelled bronze sculptures from his Cloud series (2025). These depict chubby naked figures balancing on clouds in poses of contemplation, relaxation, and meditation. The figures are emblematic of the sense of playfulness and curiosity that carry through Wei’s works. They are vessels of humour that enable the artist to probe into identity, migration, and cultural paradox.
Guan Wei’s newest work, Journey to the West, is comprised of eight panels, displayed lengthways along the longest wall of the gallery. Its paintings portray a strange assortment of characters within a rolling seascape. Where some beings evoke traditional figures from Asian mythologies, others resemble Christian angels. There is also a plate-mailed conquistador astride a winged Pegasus and alien creatures from a perhaps not-so-distant future. Other beasts resemble those that lurk in the wild, uncharted waters of map marginalia: a many-armed Vishnu emerges from the maw of a fanged sea-monster, and whales and sea serpents drift atop the waves. In several paintings, a black silhouetted figure hovers in the sky amongst the clouds, brandishing a staff. This figure is suggestive of the Monkey King, observing each scene as he traverses the strange world below, which itself is a liminal space beyond the borders of the known wherein boundaries between time, place, and culture collapse.
This paradoxical place resonates with themes in Guan Wei’s work, which the artist uses to navigate overlaps between his own Chinese cultural heritage and settler identity within Australia. His works possess a cartographic quality, marked with a cypher of constellations and navigational lines, suggestive of the artist’s attempts to map this in-between space. Journeying is also a common motif in Wei’s work as he considers his own migration from Beijing to Australia in the wake of the 1989 Tiananmen Square massacre and also broader themes of settlement, exploration, and displacement.
The exhibition includes triptychs No. 6 and No. 8 from As Myth Has It. In both works, a long central panel presents a different view of islands in the South Seas. In As Myth Has It No. 6, the islands are depicted as an illustrative map fragment. In the corner, a tall-ship encroaches upon the coastline. As Myth Has It No. 8 presents the islands in landscape overlaid with the markings of navigational plot lines. These central panels are flanked by portraits of figures in Elizabethan-era garb: men in curled wigs and tricorn hats, and women in high collars and pearled bonnets. Their faces are curiously obscured behind tropical flora and fauna: bright-feathered parrots, a peacock, and a blooming orchid. Throughout this series, Guan Wei offers challenges the fantasy of ‘discovering’ ‘exotic’ new worlds and species, and dismantles the hierarchy of culture vs nature imposed by colonial explorers.
A stand-out work is Newborn (2024). This is an immense composition of eight panels that form a singular image. The work juxtaposes the symbolism of Tantric Buddhist dakini figures with robotics. At its centre, the limbs of a yellow deity are entwined with those of a robotic being. The tableau is presented against a background of exposed wires and circuits and bordered by an ornamental frame. The image is chaotic, speaking to cycles of regeneration, replication, and reincarnation. Spirituality and technology, history and futurity are energetically entangled within a singular plane. This work is particularly compelling for the questions it raises about our increasing reliance on Artificial Intelligences, and the possible shape of a future in which our existence feels overwhelmingly inextricable from them. Guan Wei interrogates the dangers of a technological utopian paradigm, in which we willingly offer increasingly more of our humanity to the machines that augment our daily life in a relationship that is becoming more parasitic than symbiotic.
Five smaller canvases are positioned alongside the main work. Each depicts an isolated symbol: a blooming flower, a nautilus shell, a bionic alien head, a hand posed in a yogic mudra gesture, and a heart within a sprawling network of veins that evokes a visual synergy with the adjacent mechanical circuit board. Guan Wei presents a view of time that is not linear but a spiral, like the nautilus shell, that turns through patterns of history, memory, and creation as it rolls towards the future. Through the conflation of karmic and mechanical cycles, Guan Wei reminds us that this future is not predetermined but created, and through human agency, we have the capacity to both escape the possibilities to which we may feel bound, and to craft new narratives that maintain our humanity within technological utopias. While Journey to the West presents only a small selection from Guan Wei’s immense oeuvre, it possesses a rich narrative quality that builds as the viewer moves between each of the thematically different, but resonant, bodies of work. The exhibition highlights Guan Wei’s skill as a storyteller and mythmaker as he invites us to join in an exploration of his fantastic worlds. The coordinates are laid for us to find our place within these worlds where mythic and futuristic terrains collide. Alluding to Chinese fable and the figure of Sun Wukong, the Monkey King who was expelled from the Celestial Realm for his disobedience, there is a brazen naivete in this work that Guan Wei harnesses to explore the possibilities of a new world. This world is both familiar and strange; human, mythical, and dreamlike; and a place where past and future are never far apart.
Felicity Andrews is an emerging arts worker who writes, researches, and creates on Yugerra/Turrbal Land, Meanjin. She holds a Masters of Museum Studies and is currently undertaking a PhD in Art History at the University of Queensland. She works as a cultural mediator at the University of Queensland Art Museum.
