From Red Army propaganda to the pope, Chinese Artist Shen Jiawei’s canvas covers the times
Chinese-born painter Shen Jiawei's journey is one of timing and talent as he went from portraying soldiers to Catholic Church leaders
Four decades later, Shen now has a different patron commissioning his work: He has become, somewhat inexplicably, the unofficial portrait artist of the Vatican. He painted the first official portrait of Pope Francis and recently completed a huge rendition of the second most powerful figure in Rome, Cardinal George Pell, the Vatican's money man.
Shen's journey from favoured propaganda artist of the People's Liberation Army to papal portraitist is an unusual tale of talent and timing. It's a journey that took Shen from China to Australia, where he charged tourists A$30 (HK$180) to draw their portraits in Sydney's Darling Harbour, and most recently to a balcony in the Vatican gardens where he sketched Pell.
Shen was in his final year in high school when Mao Zedong launched the Cultural Revolution in 1966. His hopes of attending art school dashed with the closure of China's universities, Shen joined the Red Guards and then the People's Liberation Army, and he became one of the legions of propaganda artists who glorified workers, farmers and soldiers in the Socialist Realism style of Soviet propaganda.
In 1974, during a tour of duty in remote Heilongjiang province, Shen painted his most famous work, , featuring three soldiers guarding the Sino-Soviet border from a watchtower. The piece was included in a 1974 exhibition at the National Art Museum in Beijing that was organised by Mao's wife, who personally praised it.
With the more robust soldiers in place, the picture was reproduced and turned into propaganda posters and Shen shot to sudden fame.
"Lots of our generation copied his paintings," said fellow Chinese-born, Australian artist Guo Jian, 53, who also was a PLA propaganda artist but later joined the pro-democracy student protest movement that culminated with the 1989 Tiananmen Square crackdown.
"When we grew up in that time, there was nothing else" but propaganda art, Guo said. "He has a really great skill, and the way he painted, you can see he's slightly different from the others. I think that's what impacted us."
Today, Shen is proud of his work - not because it was good propaganda, but because he managed to become an artist in China at a time when oil paints were otherwise nearly impossible to obtain. He says he didn't sell out to the idealised standards of propaganda art that most other Chinese artists copied. Instead, he says he relied on nature to guide his brush.
"This is why today if you look back at that time, in China, most artwork is different than mine," he said. "I'm proud of that."
He similarly doesn't see his new works of Pope Francis and his No 2 as propaganda for the Catholic Church.
"I stopped my propaganda work in the 1970s," he said as laughed.
Shen first caught the attention of Australian church officials with a 1994 portrait of Mary MacKillop, the 19th-century nun who in 2010 became Australia's first saint. The portrait won Shen an important Australian art award named for the nun and enabled him to meet St. John Paul II during his 1995 visit to Australia when he beatified MacKillop.
Shen got the commission to paint Francis in August 2013, a few months after he had become the pope.
Francis didn't sit for the portrait, but the Vatican offered official photos for Shen to use.
