From Red Army propaganda to the pope, Chinese Artist Shen Jiawei’s canvas covers the times

Artist Shen Jiawei's paintings of Chinese soldiers during the Cultural Revolution were so popular with Mao's regime that 250,000 copies of his most famous work were made into propaganda posters and distributed throughout the country.

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.

"For me, one door closed, but another always opened," Shen, 66, said of his career in a recent phone interview from his studio in Bundeena, south of Sydney.

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, Standing Guard for Our Great Motherland, 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.

Shen recalls, though, that when he eventually saw it hanging in the museum, he was stunned: The soldiers' faces had been altered to adhere to the regime's standards for revolutionary art: Their faces were fatter and redder to make them appear more healthy and heroic.