Design and Art Australia Online

painter, was born in Shanghai, China. He became a practising artist in 1968 and a professional artist at the Liaoning Art Academy of China in 1981-88. In 1982-84 he was a postgraduate in the Oil Painting Department of the Central Academy of Fine Arts, Beijing. He had two solo exhibitions at the Liaoning Art Gallery in Shenyang (1984 and 1987) as well as participating in many group exhibitions in China, France, Bangladesh and Tokyo from 1972 and 1989 before migrating to Sydney in 1989, where he has had four solo shows (Hui Yi Art Gallery 1995, Quadrivium 1996, 1997 and Gallery 4A Asia-Australia Arts Centre 2002). He won the Mary Mackillop Art Award in 1995 ( Luke Roberts was a runner-up).

Shen has painted George Gittoes several times in Australia and he appears in the right foreground of the right hand panel of his first major Australian history painting, At the Turn of the Century 1999, a triptych containing over 120 notable Australians of the 1890s and 1990s commissioned by Mr Yap of Ipoh for his restored Queen Victoria Building, where they now hang. The right hand panel, Run to New Era (with the Opera House and an Endeavour-style sailing ship in the background) mainly contains contemporary sporting heroes Cathy Freeman with a two-sided flag, Don Bradman, Dawn Fraser etc., while the left hand panel, Nineties Meet Nineties (with Uluru, kangaroos, a plane and a balloon in the background), mainly consists of cultural figures such as Henry Lawson and Patrick White, Tom Roberts and Judy Cassab, Sidney Nolan – with Kelly painting – Dame Mary Gilmore, Burnum Burnum, Arthur Boyd, Brett Whiteley – holding a paintbrush like a syringe – Emily Kngwarre, Banjo Paterson at the piano inventing Waltzing Matilda , Daisy Bates with an Aboriginal woman and a crowd of Aboriginal children, William Yang (with his camera), Elle McPherson, David Malouf, Tom Keneally, Joan Sutherland, Edmund Capon facing J.F. Archibald and Dr Victor Chang. The central panel, The Elite Hall (with the Queen Victoria Building window and Sydney Town Hall in the distance) has lots of politicians (the Whitlams, Bob Carr, Henry Parkes, Cheryl Kernow, Natasha Stott Despoja, Edmund Barton, John Howard and Pauline Hanson, Kim Beazley, Bob Hawke, George Reid) and reformers like Eddie Mabo and Mary McKillop, with the small head of Quong Tart – whose tearooms were on the original site – in mid-centre. Done for a commercial sponsor two years before the billion-dollar Centenary of Federation cultural celebrations, At the Turn of the Century was better, more accessible, thoughtful history – and history painting – than anything resulting from the federal government’s largesse, the only contemporary equivalent of Tom Roberts ' Big Picture .

Zai-Jian Revolution: Shen Jiawei at Gallery 4a comprised 10 pictures dating from his Cultural Revolution paintings done in China from 1972, notably Standing Guard for Our Great Motherland 1974, to 2002 and his self-portrait triptych of the Chinese army years, Autobiography 1966/1972/1977 2002, and enormous group of 93 figures gathered around Che Guavera as Pieta, The Third World 2002. The catalogue was even more of a retrospective and included Chinese works not in the exhibition, e.g. Tolerance 1988 (Museum of the Chinese Revolution, Beijing) – 16 intellectuals who were major figures in the May-Fourth period (though not all were acceptable in 1988 and he wasn’t allowed to call it Tolerance ).

Further recognition came in 2001 with the inclusion of his Self Portrait: Suddenly Back to 1900 2000, (which shows Shen Jaiwei in traditional dress with a sulphur-crested cockatoo on his head standing in front of a view of King Street in 1900 that includes Quong Tart’s shop), in John McDonald’s National Gallery Federation show. However, like the many single figure portraits he has done in Australia, some of which have been hung in the Archibald Prize, it was not notably distinctive and seemed conventionally academic. His subtle, subversive wit is far more obvious in his large modern history paintings, notably Wise Men from the East 2001, where the three wise men are Chinese, and Absolute Truth 2000 in which Gorbachev and the Pope meet under a weirdly distorted Sistine Chapel ceiling. Even so, early in 2002 The Third World was not even hung in the Sulman Prize exhibition. Critical acclaim, however, eventuated later that year, in October 2002, with his Gallery 4a show; Bruce James ( SMH ), Ben Genocchio ( Weekend Australian ) and John McDonald ( Australian Financial Review ) all gave it lengthy and mostly laudatory reviews. On 17 October Gallery 4a hosted 'Shen Jiawei interviewed by Mabel Lee’ to a packed-out gallery.

Writers:

Kerr, Joan

Date written:

1999

Last updated:

2011