When I arrived in Australia in 1952 aged 14, my parents enrolled me in North Sydney Girls High School. On my first day there, Miss Smith, one of the teachers, identified me as a Pom and rather aggressively said that she expected that I knew nothing about Australia. I told her that I did know quite a bit. “Go on then”, she said, “tell me, who was Ned Kelly?” “He was a highwayman”, I replied. Miss Smith never let me forget this faux pas.
By way of justification, I had been brought up on English myths about “gentlemen highwaymen”, like 18th century Dick Turpin and his predecessor, the outlaw Robin Hood. These figures had been romanticised in story and film that painted them as driven to a life of crime because of injustice and class prejudice and people of noble sentiment who robbed the rich to give to the poor. The 19th century Australian Ned Kelly seemed to me to be a successor in this tradition even if he was more properly called a bushranger. Like Dick Turpin, Kelly’s life of violent crime was rapidly reinterpreted in popular fiction as a heroic stand to support the underdog against authority and to fight for personal liberties. In spite of his record of extreme violence, folk historian Graham Seal says that Kelly came to be seen as a quintessential Australian.
Sidney Nolan’s series of Kelly paintings, painted in the 40s and 50s, has been called “one of the greatest sequences of Australian paintings of the 20th century”. Now displayed in the National Gallery, they have served to enshrine in the popular imagination the image of Kelly’s iron body armour and helmet, fashioned from plough shares to defend the outlaws against the Victorian police. To this day it is hard to think of Kelly without thinking of the dramatically defined black square in Nolan’s paintings. Incidentally, Damian Smith notes that the shape and colour of the Kelly helmet reference the famous 1915 “Black Square” paintings by the Russian avant-garde artist Kazimir Malevich. Nolan’s square however is sometimes split open by a horizontal visor gap through which Kelly’s eyes may be visible, or sometimes only blue sky and the distant horizon. The effect of the solid blackness is to turn the human figure into an icon or legend, distancing it from its temporal and geographical placement.
Around the same time that I and my family arrived in Sydney, Sidney Nolan moved to England, and he was based in London until the time of his death in 1992. In his lifetime he travelled widely in Europe, Africa and Asia and, as Damian Smith notes in the catalogue of this exhibition, he was particularly impressed with the landscape and culture of China, where he visited several times up to the 1980s.
I never had the opportunity to meet Sidney Nolan, either in China or Australia, but in Beijing I lived and worked with one of his significant works for three years in the 1970s and that daily contact makes me feel a personal connection with the artist. That was the time when I was working in Beijing as Cultural Counsellor in the Australian Embassy. The embassy building included a large reception hall, accessible from the lobby, and on the wall of the lobby, facing the front doors, was displayed Nolan’s Snake series painting, which is now owned by MONA in Hobart. This series (as later enlarged and developed) comprises dozens of panels showing part of a giant snake. It is reminiscent of the Indigenous Rainbow Serpent. Nolan painted this work between 1970 and 1972. According to MONA, he was inspired by a mural he had seen in Beijing on an earlier visit. I think this was one of the “Nine Dragon” murals, probably the one in the Summer Palace, depicting dragons in various colours around a central gold imperial dragon signifying the emperor. When Gough Whitlam’s government established diplomatic relations with China in December 1972, Nolan made his Snake series available to Canberra for display in our first embassy. It was commissioned by Whitlam when he visited Beijing in 1973.
One of my first projects as Cultural Counsellor in China was the negotiation and preparation for an exhibition of Australian landscape paintings curated by Daniel Thomas, featuring both old and new works borrowed from many galleries around Australia. Shown in Beijing and Nanjing in 1976, it was the first foreign art exhibition in China after the Cultural Revolution when there had been no international cultural exchanges whatsoever, so it had a profound influence on its audience, particularly art students who had previously only been able to see foreign works reproduced in books and magazines. Chinese Australian artist Tianli Zu remembers visiting this exhibition when she was still a student in Beijing. She told me that it was largely because of this that she laterchose to move to Australia. A painting by Nolan of a Central Australian dry landscape including large anthills was included in the exhibition and featured on the cover of the catalogue. (it is now in the AGNSW). Guan Wei has said that he was fascinated by this image and the eery shapes of the red dirt anthill columns in a dry landscape.
Since moving from China to Australia some thirty years ago, Guan Wei has become a great interpreter of cultural exchanges between the two countries. I first got to know his work through his solo exhibition at the MCA in 1999. As someone who has lived and worked in both countries, I truly appreciate his insights into the world of the migrant and the refugee, and the challenges and insights that derive from the intersection of diverse cultures. In this exhibition series ofpaintings, Guan Wei has made Nolan’s iconic black Ned Kelly figure into a solid but ghostly presence.
This Kelly is entirely black from head to toe, not simply a figure wearing a black helmet as in the Nolan series, and in one painting he is accompanied by a black wife and black children although Kelly never married or had children. These are clearly mythical beings. This supernatural Kelly figureGuan Wei says represents the Australian individualist and rebellious spirit. As such, it is above time and place. It is apparently found in ancient grotto murals from the Silk Road and emerges in traditional Chinese landscapes. The Kellyseries is in some ways the obverse of his earlier paintings of Australian landscapes with intruding Chinese figures and motifs, but like them it merges fact and fiction and myth and history. Those philosophically or aesthetically inclined may see the Passage and Echo series as a comment on the influence of Australian larrikinism on Chinese culture, or the juxtaposition and opposition between West and East in artistic and political terms. I for my part, find the series supremely funny.
By way of explanation, allow me to provide a brief introduction to humour theory, that is, what humour is and how it works, and focus on the Incongruity Theory. This states that humour and laughter arise from something being unexpected or not in accordance with general expectations. (Riddles are examples: Q. What can you catch but not throw? A. A cold.) In classical Chinese landscape paintings, we expect to see a scholar playing his lute high in the misty mountains or a fisherman in his boat under the willows on the edge of the lake, but not Ned Kelly and his mother. Place and time are all confused. Tanks and airplanes track Kelly down on the Huangshan Mountain. He escapes by boat through the Yangzi Gorges. On the Australian goldfields, a powerful owl shrieks as the sergeant falls from his horse, and the horse tramples the head of a pigtailed Chinaman. The troopers emerge from an anthill – or perhaps it is a nuclear submarine turret?
Humour theorists, like standup comedians, know that jokes are constructed when the author misdirects the listener. The listener “gets” the joke when he or she recognises the absurdity or incongruity. This produces a pleasurable feeling and, often, laughter. Philosopher Immanuel Kant explained this as the “sudden transformation of a strained expectation into nothing”. Of course, some topics make us laugh more than others but for all jokes to work, whether visual or verbal, the recipient needs a certain amount of background knowledge and usually shares the beliefs and prejudices of the comedian. In other words, humour involves understanding other people’s perspectives.
I appreciate the humour in Guan Wei’s work, because I know about Ned Kelly and about Sidney Nolan’s Kelly series and I know the conventions about Chinese “mountain and water” shanshui landscape paintings and the history behind the Dunhuang Grottoes on the Silk Road and its thousand-year-old star atlas. To me, the joke is that the iconic Kelly spirit, that anti-authoritarianism, is universal, not confined by Australian or Chinese culture and history. It has an eternal value, appreciated everywhere by people who refuse to submit to conventional political correctness.
Guan Wei and I live and move between East and West, between China and Australia, so we share common knowledge attributes and can laugh at each other’s jokes. And the same applies to just about everyone here this evening. So thank you, Guan Wei, for bringing us together!
– Jocelyn Chey AM, during the opening reception of Passage and Echo
Passage and Echo: Sidney Nolan x Guan Wei
10 Jul — 16 Aug 2025
