Footnotes

PROVENANCE
The Gene & Brian Sherman Collection, Sydney, a gift from the artist

The story of my first meeting with Guan Wei has been well
documented and yet, in different contexts, somehow bears repeating.
Three young Chinese hopefuls, who in conversation turned out to be
artists, gingerly approached me at the Paddington Hargrave Street
Gallery asking, via Liu Xiao Xian's minimal English, whether I would be
prepared to look at their work.
At Sherman Galleries we had systems in place for unsolicited artist
submissions and I generally did not stop my own work to engage with
drop-in creatives. Intuitively, in this case, I changed protocol –agreeing
to a quick look. The threesome looked so eager and were ever so
clearly strangers in a foreign land.
The tallest and least talkative of the three - Guan Wei - laid out an
astonishing (to me) small body of work on the Gallery's mid-grey
monochromatic office floor carpet. The year was 1989 and the rest as
they say, is history.
Along the way and over the many years that followed, I learned about
China's post-revolutionary story, travelled multiple times to Beijing and
Shanghai and continue, to this day, to read and follow the country's
transformation and ever-growing influence.
Through Guan Wei I met many of the once-dissident artists whose
suffering during the Cultural Revolution and subsequent early nineties
idealism, had shaped their vision of a relatively bright future. Cai Guo
Qiang, Xu Bing, Ai Weiwei, Zhang Huan, Wenda Gu, later to become
Contemporary Chinese artist royalty, were all became a part of a close
circle that importantly included curators and writers such as Dr Claire
Roberts, Professor Nicholas Jose, Professor Geremie Barmé, Linda
Jaivin and Nobel Prize winner, Gao Xingjian, all of whom were later to
become significant academics and authors.
Celebrated now as a formidable part of the post-Tiananmen Square
wave, the aforementioned group of three – including Ah Xian and
Guan Wei – went from strength to strength as both artists and
communicators.
The first solo exhibitions at Sherman Galleries for Guan Wei were
staged in 1993 and 1995, after which, together with his wife Liu Pin,
we became treasured friends. Daughter Mimi was soon born to Guan
Wei and Liu Pin and two beautiful children to Ah Xian. I keep in touch
periodically with them all to this day.
Guan Wei's work on offer here was, with hindsight, created during a
golden moment in modern and contemporary Chinese history. Despite
their small scale, the pieces are clearly quite precious. The couple
seemingly float free of constraints, referencing the times and capturing
a moment when the world opened up and the potential for positive
change emerged from dreamscapes, becoming an ever more tangible
reality.
Dr Gene Sherman