Jiawei Shen

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Jiawei Shen

Birth name	沈嘉蔚 (Pinyin: Shĕn Jiā wèi)
Born	September 16, 1948
Nationality	Chinese Australian
Field	Painting
Works	Standing Guard for Our Great Motherland (1974) At the Turn of the Century (1998) Portrait of Crown Princess Mary of Denmark (2005)

Shen Jiawei (born 1948) is an internationally recognised Chinese-Australian painter.

Shen Jiawei was born in Shanghai and emigrated to Australia in 1989. He was largely self-taught and became popular with the Chinese government for his 'revolutionary' images of workers and soldiers. His best known work from that period, “Standing Guard for Our Great Motherland” (1974) was subsequently shown in the Guggenheim Museum, both in New York and Bilbao, in the China: 5000 Years exhibition, 1998.

In 1995 he won the Mary McKillop Art Award and received a medal from Pope John Paul II. Shen is now one of Australia’s leading portrait artists known for the academic and literary qualities of his works.

Shen is also a painter of large-scale history pictures represented in major public collections including the National Art Gallery of China and the Museum of the Chinese Revolution, in Beijing. His more playful works examine political and cross-cultural issues through appropriation. “Absolute Truth” (2000) shows Gorbachov and the Pope conversing in the Sistine Chapel and in “Wise Men from the East” (2002) the Magi in Leonardo da Vinci's unfinished Adoration of the Magi are Chinese sages.^[1]

Recent portraits include Melbourne's Lord Mayor, John So in a possum skin cloak (2003), the Hon. Tom Hughes AO QC and the portrait of Crown Princess Mary of Denmark (2005) which hangs in the National Portrait Gallery, Canberra.

His wife Lan Wang is an artist and sculptor and his daughter Sidney is currently studying at the University of New South Wales.