1 Shen Jiawei (b1948 Shanghai, China) Lives and works in Australia.
The Tower of Babel (2023) Mural, oil on canvas mounted on wooden boards. 90 panels, each panel size: 120 cm x 120 cm
2 Standing Guard for Our Great Motherland (1974)
ink on paper (reprinted 1975) 62.4x51.4cm
3 Pieter Breugel the Elder (c1525-1569) The Tower of Babel (c1563)
oil on wood panel 114×155 cm
A Professor Jing Han westernsydney.edu.au
Shen Jiawei, one of Australia’s best known master portraitists, was born and grew up in China. He was a well-established oil painting artist in China where his painting Standing Guard for Our Great Motherland (1974) became an icon…..
…..Shen’s masterpiece, Tower of Babel (2023), an epic artwork 20 years in the making that recreates an alternative art history of the 20th century by tracing the biggest movement of all: the International Communist Movement. The whole work consists of 90 panels, with remixes of over 100 original artworks and containing 400 individual portraits of historical characters on four murals entitled respectively “Utopia”, “Internationale”, “Gulag” and “Saturnus”. The biggest and central piece is “Utopia” which has Pieter Bruegel’s Tower of Babel as the framework with the design of Tatlinʼs Tower on the top. Tower of Babel is a visual history of the political and art movements of the 20th century, reimagined and curated by the artist Shen Jiawei….
Tower of Babel was conceived in 2001 and completed in 2023. This monumental artwork has been more than twenty years in the making. The actual work is housed in the artist’s purpose-built three-storey studio, covering four walls with 90 panels. The epic masterpiece contains remixes of 130 original artworks and 400 individual portraits of historical characters who were related to or associated with the international Communist movement throughout the 20th century. The four murals are named “Utopia”, “L’Internationale”, “Gulag” and “Saturnus”…
…The way he represents history in his artworks is quite unique and requires reflection from a contemporary and fresh angle. In his Sulman Prize-winning work, Peking Treaty (2006), he transposes Mantegna’s foreshortened Christ to the empty centre of the large Peking Treaty table where Eastern and Western diplomats negotiate a settlement of the Boxer Revolution.
A gifted painter and portraitist of renown, he has been an Archibald Prize finalist fourteen times (including once as runner-up in 1997) and the winner of the Mary MacKillop Art Award (1995), the Sulman Prize (2006) and the Gallipoli Art Award (2016). He has been commissioned by the Australian Government to paint official portraits for the Governor-General, the Prime Minister, Speakers and HRH Crown Princess of Denmark. Best-known for his complex history paintings, his works are represented in public and private collections in Australia and throughout the world including, the Vatican art collection and the National Museum, the National Art Museum and the National Military Museum in Beijing.
C asiasociety.org translated by Valerie C. Doran
Excerpts from “The Fate of a Painting” by Shen Jiawei
Since its completion in 1974, my oil painting Standing Guard for Our Great Motherland has had a very strange fate. It has become somewhat of a cultural artifact, an embodiment of the narrative of the Cultural Revolution.
When Mao Zedong launched the Cultural Revolution in May 1966, it signaled the end of my dreams of studying at an art academy. But at the same time, the Cultural Revolution turned me into a painter, and, what is more, a painter who achieved fame at a very young age.
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I grew up in a small provincial city and never had the chance to be trained in the fundamentals of art. My only influence was an uncle who had studied art in the past. So, before I became a painter, I had never done life drawing, plaster modeling, or still lifes. In fact, many artists of my generation were able to become oil painters only because of the Cultural Revolution. Before 1966, most Chinese households could never have afforded to buy oil paints for their children who studied art; most people’s monthly salaries amounted to the cost of only a few dozen tubes of paint. But during the Cultural Revolution, all work units needed people to paint portraits of Mao Zedong. Once we completed the paintings, we were allowed to keep the leftover paints to do our own work. This is why oil painting (western painting) subsequently became so widespread in China; it was one of the more positive by-products of the Cultural Revolution.
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I completed my work [Standing Guard] in July 1974. In keeping with the practice of the times, I did not sign the painting, but wrote only my name and work unit on the back of the canvas. In September, I was notified that this work had been selected for the national art exhibition. In October, I went on leave and used my own money to travel to Beijing to see the exhibition. On the train, I used my scrapbook of source material to write and copy notes on the process I followed in creating the painting. These notes were half true and half fabricated. This was because at that time any kind of writing, even personal diaries, could be subjected to public reading. Any politically incorrect word could bring disaster in its wake. So I had to make sure that even my notes on my creative process were in keeping with official standards.
When I [arrived in Beijing and] walked into the National Art Gallery, I discovered that my painting was hanging in the most prominent position in the exhibition hall, on the center left. But when I moved in for a closer look, I was in for a shock: the faces of the two soldiers had been reworked. It was obvious that my efforts to paint a picture as close to reality as possible had not been acceptable to the authorities.
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In 1981, a friend in the Heilongjiang Provincial Artists Association in Harbin told me that Standing Guard had been sent back by the National Art Gallery and was being kept in the art association’s storage area. He said that I could go and pick it up. The next year, when I went to get it, I discovered that both the outer and inner frames were gone. The canvas has been improperly rolled (outside in) and tossed into a rubbish heap in the basement. I unrolled it just a bit and saw that flakes of paint were coming off. When I got it back to Shenyang, I did not dare to open it all the way and just stuck it under my bed, where it stayed for many years.
In 1989, I emigrated to Australia. In 1997, I was invited by the Guggenheim Museum to lend it my painting for a major exhibition, “China: Five Thousand Years.” I asked someone to bring the rolled-up painting from China to Sydney for me. I took it to the conservation department of the Art Gallery of New South Wales, and there, for the first time, I unrolled it completely. Everyone in the room at that moment was in shock: the painting was covered with soot and had suffered water damage; two-thirds of its surface had come off. Under the guidance of the professional conservators [there], I slowly and painstakingly restored the painting. However, there were two sections of the painting that I was glad were damaged: the two faces that had been repainted on the orders of Wang Mantian were completely obliterated. Referring to photographs I had of the original work, as well as my extensive notes, I was now able to restore them to their original appearance.
By 1970 he found himself in Heilongjiang province on the Russian border. There he worked as a propaganda artist, entering paintings in national competitions. In 1974 his picture, Standing guard for our great motherland was praised by Mao’s wife, Jiang Qing, and acquired for the National Art Museum. When he saw the work on display in the museum Jiawei was shocked to find the soldiers’ faces had been repainted to make them look more heroic. In this new guise the painting was reproduced in poster form and sent all over China. ... The actual painting was dumped from the museum after the fall of the Gang of Four and recovered by the artist from a rubbish dump in 1981. He restored the work and recently sold it at auction for a sizeable sum, which he is using to build a large new studio in Bundeena.
E nelsonmeersfoundation.org.au
Renowned Chinese-Australian artist Jiawei Shen is painting a monumental artwork that he claims will give meaning to his whole life. This former Red Guard, still famous in China for painting one of the most famous images of the Cultural Revolution, Standing Guard For The Great Motherland, is now creating a fantastic parable of the history of Communism, in the style that has established him as the foremost history painter in Australia today.
Epic in concept and scale, his Tower of Babel painting depicts over 400 famous and infamous characters including politicians, soldiers, scientists, artists, writers and filmmakers who were won over by the utopian vision of the Communist movement, as well as many forgotten people who lost their lives to Revolution. It also includes remixes of 130 iconic artworks by left wing artists, including Picasso, Matisse, Léger, Diego Rivera and Frida Kahlo; on a huge canvas of 130 square meters, as high as a 3-story building.
In telling the stories of Jiawei’s own personal journey and that of his wife Lan, from poverty in Mao’s China, through the tumult of the Cultural Revolution, and eventually as political refugees to Australia, the film will show how personal biography inspires art. Now, as tensions between Australia and China escalate and there is even talk of war from some Australian politicians, how will Jiawei’s most important work be received? Can the past speak to the present or will it be silenced?
F the artist: One painting can have many different meanings and I encourage people to make their own assumptions about the painting.
WATCH https://www.sff.org.au/program/browse/welcome-to-babel
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