Beijing-born Guan Wei is one of the most provocative and distinctive artists making work in Australia today, about both China and his adopted homeland, and the connection between the two nations. He first left China for Australia in 1989, following the protests in Tiananmen Square, and has divided his time between Sydney and Beijing since then.
Galleries all around Australia have avidly collected Wei's work, including the Museum of Contemporary Art, which has some of his most memorable pieces. They're putting them on display in a new exhibition in their first floor northern gallery for summer. Included is the landmark painting 'Feng Shui' (2004), which is painted onto 120 square panels, and stands five metres tall, wrapping its 18-metre length around a corner of the gallery. There's also an early work from 1992 called 'Two-finger exercise', about the political protest movement in China at the time, made up of 48 different works on paper.