Painting History - Shen Jiawei

The celebrity artist Shen Jiawei’s history paintings are held at the National Museum, Art Museum, and Military Museum in Beijing, as well in public or private collections in the Vatican, Australia, China, the United States, New Zealand, Malaysia, Hong Kong, and the European Union. In addition to being famous for his history paintings, Shen is a leading portraitist who has painted the official portraits of dignitaries such as Pope Francis, Princess Mary of Denmark and Australian Governor-General Sir Peter Cosgrove.

While a significant number of excellent artists have emerged in China with backgrounds like Shen Jiawei’s, very few have written significant studies about their experiences that can serve to expand the basis of our knowledge of those times, and about how and why art flourished in China in those times.

A bibliophile, Shen is an avid, meticulous reader and thinker. Importantly, he is dedicated to the genre of history painting, even though this genre has virtually died in the West with the advent of photography. He believes that the history painter can expand the psychological space of a canvas through innovative strategies. He has substantiated these innovative strategies in his paintings, and, more importantly, in his book Painting History has written in detail about these strategies.

Shen argues that there are humanist communists such as Norman Bethune and Fred Hollows in later times. This book focuses on a range of colorful intellectuals who embraced communism against fascism in the 1920s and 1930s, and visited China during the Japanese invasion as well as fighting in the Spanish Civil War. How many of us know that a Chinese contingent had travelled to Spain to fight for the Republican cause? Shen probes issues in the international communist movement that swept the world in those times and ponders global problems that confront the modern world.

Shen is a meticulous notetaker and diarist, and the book draws on these rich archival materials, as well as what can be described as his photographic memory.

Many significant insights are revealed in this book because of Shen’s erudition in important twentieth- and twenty-first-century Chinese and Western writings. Details about ordinary Chinese people are perceptively discussed with a ring of authenticity that seldom appears in other writings. These details are drawn out for us due to Shen’s artist’s keen sensitivity.

Painting History will appeal to readers with an interest in gaining a fresh understanding of modern China, especially in its art history, society, and politics; its people and what intellectual problems preoccupied them; and what happens when Chinese artists relocate to Western societies, such as Australia. This book will also be of great interest to those with an interest in the genre of history painting and those who seek to learn more about the artistic innovations introduced by Shen.