亚太著名策展人Alexie的演讲｜关伟《那一片海》开幕致辞

当我走进这个展览时，我会迫不及待的想谈谈，那一刻为什么我会感到自己和关伟一起开始了一场时间旅行，以及这场‘旅途’是什么样子的。

这些美丽的纸本作品，跨越了这位卓越的艺术家近二十五的非凡想象力。关伟在精神上是如此具有广度和深度，他慷慨的与我们分享了非凡的生命力和幽默的魅力，还有人性、世俗、深刻、美丽、困难和复杂，在那一刹那，这种感受几乎是不可阻挡的，这就是为什么关伟是我们这个时代最伟大的当代艺术家之一。

我需要从关伟2001年的画作开始。我不打算谈论单个作品，因为我们今天在时间胶囊里，外面还下着雨。但在2001年，关伟对杰出的策展人侯瀚如说: “我个人的创作方式是从不同种类的文化和艺术中寻求灵感。我经常从新的和旧的、东方的和西方的，以及各种不同的主题中选择，然后以一种新的方式将它们组合在一起。这需要某种标准。我给自己定下了三条准则：智慧性、幽默性和知识性。

我真的很喜欢这段话，我认为真正伟大的艺术家创作的作品是超越他们所处的时代而存在的，这正是我最迷恋于艺术的地方。艺术家的职业生涯不应该以线性的方式来解读。我相信这些艺术家们创作的作品可能在40年内都看起来似乎意义不明，但在未来的某一刻，这些具有前瞻性的思维会着陆，并告诉我们该怎样去了解自身。你就是那些艺术家中的一员，关伟。你用智慧、知识和幽默来创造、贡献和参与的方式绝对是非凡的，然而这其中的幽默也定是包含了对死亡和事物极限的深刻理解。

大家都明白，除非你真正明白生活其实并不好笑，否则你很难成为一个风趣的人。要想达到这种悲怆和人性的境界，在不要求人们以不同的方式看待某件事情的情况下打动他们，并将幽默作为实现这一目的的一种手段，你就必须变得脆弱。

Geoff（前澳大利亚驻华大使），谢谢你站在这。你与中国有着长达半个世纪的密切联系，并且对那些能够深入挖掘自身弱点、敢于冒险、通过艺术和文化来表现中国的艺术家有着如此深厚的热情。如果不是他们，这些在中国的历史上将不会以任何其他形式记录下来。

When I walked in this exhibition, and I will talk more about this in a moment why, what I felt like I was doing with Guan Wei was time travel. This is a beautiful series of works on paper that traverse nearly 25 and 30 years of this incredible artist’s remarkable imagination. The breadth and depth of Guan Wei are so in spirit, and the generosity with which he shares is a singular life force and ability to be funny and human and profane and profound and beautiful and difficult and complicated in one moment is almost singularly inexorable and it is why you are one of the great contemporary artists of our times.

So, I need to begin with the words of Guan Wei from 2001. Because this exhibition works from, as I said, over thirty years and I’m not going to speak to individual works because we are in time capsule together with rain outside today. But in 2001, Guan Wei said to Hou Hanru, the incredible and iconic curator, “My personal way of doing things is to seek creative inspiration from different kinds of culture and art. I often choose things from both old and new, from both East and West, and from various different subjects and then put them together in a new way. This requires some sort of standard. And I’ve laid down three requirements for myself: wisdom, humour, and knowledge. Wisdom is to make clever choices to engender an interesting combination. Humour makes the pictures lively and fun, reducing the gap between the work and the viewer to allow for an intimate and friendly feeling. Knowledge imbues the work with certain depth, so it is not just pleasing to the eye, it stimulates the observer’s mind and involves the audience in the work. These three requirements are always interconnected and evolving.”

I really love that quote, because something I really love about art is that really great artists make works that don’t exist in the moment in which they created. An artist’s career should never be read in a linear way. I believe artists might make a work in a moment that doesn’t make sense for forty years, but in the moment in the future where it makes sense, it lands, and it tells what we need to know about ourselves. Or sometimes an artist makes the work, you know, today, but actually is a work that they could’ve made thirty years ago. And that work then changes the way that everything gets seen going forward. And you are really one of those artists, Guan Wei. And the way in which you make and contribute, and participate with wisdom, knowledge and humour is absolutely extraordinary and I do also believe that humour requires a deep kinship with an understanding of mortality and limits of things.

You can’t be funny unless you actually understand that life is actually not funny. In order to be able to reach that level of pathos and humanity to touch people without to be able to ask them to see something in a different way and to be able to use humour as a device to do that requires you to be vulnerable. And vulnerability is a political act. Many of you grew up in different contexts and circumstances, but many people here today grew up in China in the late 20th century at a time when the vulnerability was the most dangerous and political act. [Guan Wei,] You had to hide your vulnerability and that came out through the works of artist, and Geoff you standing there is such a gift. You’ve had such a remarkable half-century relationship with China and such a deep passion for artists who were able to dig deep in their vulnerability to take a risk, to represent through art and culture, a representation of China through time that wouldn’t otherwise been documented in any other form.

We went to see the MCA work [Sea, Sand and Stars for VIVID Sydney] together and it was such a joy. It was this moment of joy. You’re going to see that work and you are going to see this incredible moving image montage that draws up so much of that symbology and iconography, that you are going to see in every work around you. And you’re going to want to dance and you’re going to want to laugh and you’re going to want to feel human and you’re going to look at the person next to you and you’re going to hold their hand. If you’re on your own, you’re going to feel the energy, the poetry that you [Guan Wei] bring.

I think with Guan Wei, what we see in all the works that are in this room is nobility to work with iconography, symbology, mythology, [he] has such a deep history of art history and politics and culture. [Guan Wei,] You were born in the 1950s; your family are a Manchu family, your great-grandfather was a poet, a scholar, and a specialist in literature, in calligraphy; your father was part of Peking opera and you describe him as the man of wit and of knowledge and of good humour and grace. And that many of the colours that appear through the origins and anemology of Peking opera come into form when you moved to Australia and came to Tasmania in the early 1990s and take one of the first residencies of any artists in the Museum of Contemporary Art in 1992. And when your work moves out of monochrome into this colour field, and I think what I love about you, most of all, when your work moves between, and I think paper.

Paper shows are often neglected. Paper is not often seen as what it is, which is essentially the most fundamental of all material forms for an artist. Paper is where an idea begins, begins with the word, begins with the gesture, begins with the line. And the paper folds, shifts shape – shapeshifts, and moves into something else. We have the paper that surrounds us here. We have the boards. And have your marks move back and forth through time. You also have drawings you made for the animation on the façade of the MCA. That animation begins with paper.

From your great-grandfather and his calligraphy, through the notes and sheets that your father would’ve wrote through to now to paper says something. Paper is also what makes your identity something which people try to find. People try to find you as a Chinese artist, Chinese Australian artist, an Australian artist. But you’re actually just an artist. The titular, profane and beautiful elements of your work that are represented in the show are incredible ways in which you use maps to serve collinearity of time of time and to introduce elements of surreal and dream of altered, different consciousness shifts the way we understand how we map out personal relationships.

These incredible new works up here [‘The Sea Beyond’ series] bring together some sort of hybrid Greek mythology with Chinese woodcut paintings that are slightly perverse and kinky, little bit speculative, they look like they might be antiquities but are pure fictions are such a delight. This incredible work behind you [‘Enigma’ series] is one of my favourites in the show. The shelves made particularly for this work. I love the beautiful black-on-white monochrome with the appearance of red. The use of language, the stamp of your name, and the Chinese wax stamps are so familiar. I feel that cat climbing on the fence. I feel the architecture. I walked here today with my very unglamorous Wellington boots, and I thought about this work and how this work evokes through the rocks, through the representation of landscape, through the history of Chinese architecture and culture. Something of how the elements and representation of time can be manifested in form.

I will just say before I finish, when you are looking at the show today, I would ask you to think about the fact that this is just, every moment in the practice of Guan Wei is a beginning. Most of you would think the most important thing about being an artist is to be emerging. But ideas emerge in all stages of an artist’s career. And you [Guan Wei] are an artist for whom ideas are ever present and a constant companion. And that you have the ability to keep going further and further into yourself, to be generous with new generations of audiences, of collectors, influence generations of artists, and to generate, to influence and to create language of who it is we are – as not just Australians but citizens of the world, and our social, cultural and political responsibilities to grapple difficult and complicated truth is a real gift. And thank you for showing up. And thank you for always being present. And thank you for never stopping to begin. Because it is your beginning that will allow us to go somewhere further. And thank you very much.

Alexie Glass-Kantor
Executive Director of Artspace

横屏观看效果更好

关伟，《迷·境 No.1》，2013，板上绘画，太湖石，30 x 200cm

关伟，《迷·境 No.5》，2013，板上绘画，35 x 170cm

关伟，2016，《无题 No.3》，板上丙烯，41 x 32 cm

关伟，2016，《无题 No.4》，板上丙烯，41 x 32 cm

关伟，2016，《无题 No.6》，板上丙烯，41 x 32 cm

关于朱雀艺术

创立于2015年的朱雀艺术是澳大利亚首间专注中国当代艺术的独立双语画廊，坐落于地标建筑悉尼大桥边，和澳大利亚当代艺术博物馆MCA近在咫尺。朱雀艺术与一批顶尖的中国当代艺术家和优秀青年艺术家密切合作，致力为澳大利亚及太平洋地区的藏家与艺术爱好者提供一个了解中国当代艺术的平台。

Founded in 2015, Vermilion Art is the first independent commercial gallery in Australia focusing on Chinese contemporary art. It is located near the iconic Sydney Harbour Bridge and within easy reach of the Museum of Contemporary Art (MCA). Through close collaboration with leading and emerging contemporary Chinese artists, Vermilion Art has introduced outstanding Chinese art to the collectors, art institutions and the general public in Australia and the Pacific.