"Китайский Глазунов"
Jiawei Shen is one of Australia's leading portrait artists. The Weekend Australian of April 16, 2005 placed him first out of ten Chinese Australians to have made great contributions to the nation's culture, academe and business. The newspaper further commented: "Jiawei Shen has painted some of Australia's most prominent citizens, but the commission that will add lustre to his name is the portrait of Denmark's Crown Princess Mary destined for the National Portrait Gallery."
Born in Shanghai in 1948, Shen came to prominence as a celebrated realist history painter in the mid-1970's. His milestone work, Standing Guard for our Great Motherland (1974), was praised by Madame Mao. For this reason, by the dramatic political changes happened in China, it was issued as half a million copies in later 1970's and was nearly destroyed in 1981. This painting was finally restored by the artist and exhibited in the famous China: 5000 years exhibition, at both the New York and Bilbao branches of the Guggenheim Museum in 1998. Another important work from this period, Climbing over the Great Snow Mountain (1977), is now in the Allen Memorial Art Museum at Oberlin College, USA. The 1980's saw production of several important works which are all now in the National Art Gallery and National History Museum of China. These include the eleven metre canvas Red Star over China (1987) which portrays more than a hundred figures of historic importance, and his great liberalist painting Tolerance (1988).
Shen started painting since childhood. He is self-taught thanks to Chairman Mao's closure of all universities from 1966 till his death in 1976. Shen volunteered to be a soldier farmer in Manchuria near the Russian border in 1970 and began his artist career in this region. It was only in 1982 to 1984 that the artist was able to get formal polishing of his already formidable talent at the Central Academy of Fine Arts in Beijing. Afterwards he worked as a professional artist in the Liaoning Art Studio. During this time he won first place and several other prizes at the National Art Exhibition Prize, as well as countless provincial art awards, and is still regarded as China's leading history painter, though he emigrated to Australia in 1989. Commissions from China continue: in 2000 from the National Military Museum and in 2003 from his home town of Jiaxing's City Museum. He was also an invited participant in the Beijing International Art Biennale in 2003 and 2005.
