Jiawei Shen’s sprawling work is a parable of Communism

As a boy he idolised Mao and went on to join the Red Guard but Tiananman Square changed everything for the artist. His latest masterwork depicts it all.

Jiawei Shen. Picture: Peter Solness

Jiawei Shen describes Tower of Babel as “my last big project”. The monumental painting, which takes up 130 square metres across four walls of his studio in sleepy Bundeena, south of ­Sydney, took him seven years to complete. It’s a ­parable of the international Communist movement, born in Russia in 1917 and exported around the world; the great social experiment that promised ­utopia for the people, but gave them something rather different.

It’s personal for Jiawei, 76. He was a year old when Mao came to power in China, and grew up idolising the revolutionary leader. He lived through the Great Famine (death toll: 30 million) and the torturous years of the Cultural Revolution, and he even became a Red Guard, though his weapon of choice was always the paintbrush. Jiawei’s 1974 work Standing Guard for our Great Motherland was an iconic propaganda poster, and he went on to forge a reputation as one of the country’s finest history painters.

Jiawei Shen with a portion of Tower of Babel. Picture: Peter Solness

The Tiananmen Square atrocity of 1989 was the turning point. Jiawei, who’d recently emigrated to Sydney, resigned from the Chinese Communist Party in protest and threw himself into a new life. At first, he earned a crust at ­Circular Quay, sitting on a milk crate painting portraits of tourists. But in due course he became a renowned artist here, too; he painted an official portrait of Prime Minister John Howard, as well as Pope Francis and Princess Mary of Denmark. He’s a regular finalist in the Archibald Prize, and took out the Sir John Sulman Prize in 2006.

In this image from the Olive Cotton Award, Jiawei is pictured with a portion of Tower of Babel in his ­studio. His neighbour Peter Solness, a pioneer of the photographic “light painting” technique, created it in absolute darkness, late at night. Solness set up his camera to take a very long exposure, then used a torch to illuminate Jiawei’s face and each face in the painting; to reach the top of the 7.2m-high work, he attached the torch to a pool cleaning pole. It’s a ­standard modus ­operandi for Solness – but what did ­Jiawei make of it all? “Very surprising!” he says. “I never experienced anything like that before.”