The following is a brief preview - the full content of this page is available to premium users only.
Click here to subscribe...
There is something unusual about two works in the recent Australian Centre for Contemporary Art (ACCA) exhibition, 'Cycle Tracks will Abound in Utopia'. Conceptually and aesthetically; these works compliment others in this rousing and timely exhibition which explores the notion of Utopia as a realm of hope and optimism via an engagement with issues of migration, industrial relations, architecture, environmental activism, politics, economics and social planning. However, what makes Guan Wei's wall painting, Home of Dream, and Louisa Bufardeci's installation, Team Joy, particularly exciting is the way that they came to appear in the exhibition. Like twenty other pieces which have been seen at ACCA over the past two years, these works are the products of the Centre's generous commissions program. Commissioned specifically for 'Cycle Tracks will Abound in Utopia', Guan Wei's wall painting is a profoundly humane response to a subject that is too often depersonalised when terms like 'asylum seeker' and 'refugee' are overused, emptied out, and come to denote a hot political issue rather than a person. This work maps the tumultuous journey across the water of people who are fleeing from unnamed horrors to a 'utopian' land of hope and promise. As it stretches across three walls, Guan Wei's painting is populated with the imagery and figures that we have come to know from this leading contemporary artist. Since moving to Australia from China fifteen years ago, Guan Wei has developed an iconography of islands, maps, boats, vast expanses of water and anonymous humanoid figures. Eyeless and with large, desperate, open mouths, the figures in Home of Dream help each other to pile into overflowing boats, and point back at the threatening winds that blow over... The rest of this article is available to subscribers of Eyeline