Guan Wei’s “Australerie” Ceramics and the Binary Bind of Identity Politics

This paper considers Australian artist Guan Wei’s use of Aboriginal Australian-inspired motifs in seven related series of porcelain vases and dishes created in 2012 and 2014 in Jingdezhen, Jiangxi Province, once considered China’s “Porcelain Capital”. Although significant for their quantity and their transposition of his signature style to a new medium, neither these ceramics nor the artist’s engagement with Aboriginal Australia in these and earlier works have received substantial critical attention. As one of the most prominent representatives of the “post-Tiananmen generation” of Chinese émigrés who arrived in Australia after 1989, Guan Wei’s art has instead been consistently tied to a multiculturalist identity politics that foregrounds his combinations of Chinese and Euro-American iconographies. In contrast to this prevailing critical perspective, his ceramics create an idiosyncratic and exotic vision of Australia in which White Australians are either absent or appear as malign intruders. Like the eighteenth-century fashion for Chinoiserie once inspired by export ware manufactured in Jingdezhen, Guan Wei’s “Australerie” aesthetic blurs fact and fiction, East and West, to uncover a site of imagined encounter that exceeds the binary bind of identity politics, beyond the censure or control of White Australian viewers.