Log In


Reset Password
Lifestyle

From Chinese propaganda to the pope

Artist’s life travels an unlikely path from Mao to Francis
Chinese-Australian artist Jiawei Shen painted Cardinal George Pell, left, and also has painted a portrait of Pope Francis. 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.

VATICAN CITY – 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 man in Rome, Cardinal George Pell, the Vatican’s money guy.

Shen’s journey from favored 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 $30 a pop for 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 said of his career in a recent phone interview from his studio in Bundeena, south of Sydney.

He was in his final year in high school when Mao Zedong launched the Cultural Revolution, the 1966-1976 campaign to restore ideological purity to China’s anti-capitalist revolution.

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, fully embracing the communist spirit of the times. In the PLA, his self-taught artistic talents were recognized, 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 organized 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.

With the more robust soldiers in place, the picture was reproduced and turned into propaganda posters and Shen shot to fame; in the 1970s and ’80s, he was one of the best-known artists in China.

“Lots of our generation copied his paintings,” said fellow Chinese-born, Australian artist Guo Jian, 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 idealized 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, laughing. “Even church-commission work, this is part of normal artwork, part of commission and part of history.”



Reader Comments