Guan Wei’s Unfamiliar Land dealt with a complex geo-politics: empire, globalism, population movement, large-scale environmental change, militarism and militarily imposed order, border control, resource control. So, a big picture.
The first room stated the neo-imperialist military theme: the walls populated by black, dramatically large, silhouettes of fighter and fighter-bomber aircraft, a group of charging soldiers, destroyer class ships. Beneath glass on a table in the centre of this room ran a long—and famous—antique Chinese scroll painting, in reproduction, showing village life along a river. Moving through this gentle and varied scene, again in menacing, stealthy black, Guan Wei placed modern soldiers in hunt-and-pursuit mode. They contrasted strongly with the daily peasant life of fishing, harvesting, wood gathering, etcetera, importing chaos and, effectively transforming all village activity into suspicious behaviour. Was that a bundle of sticks on the worker’s back, or a bomb? Were those peasants clearing a river or seeking to camouflage something? And so on. The piece is entitled Looking For Enemies 2006. The effects were to demonise, to polarise into good and evil and restructure the narrative into one of terrorising search-and-destroy and a countervailing furtive hurry and hide. That this might be computer-game imagery—scenarios of warfare, hunt-and-pursuit, search-and-destroy was an added irony.
Room two had a table set up in its middle as for a meeting, with places set and copies at each of Kyoto protocols to be ratified. Around the walls were hung identical dye-cut and flattened cardboard packages: they suggested aid or emergency kits. Each was devoted to particular issues that were identified almost unobtrusively between the United Nations serial numbers and formatting: fierce flood, famine, acid rain, pollution, great plague, contagion, locusts, drought…. They