http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jiawei_Shen
Shen Jiawei (born 1948) is a Chinese Australian painter. He is a winner of the Sir John Sulman Prize.
[edit] Life and work
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.
In 2006, he won the Sir John Sulman Prize.
His wife Lan Wang is also a painter and sculptor and his daughter is currently studying at the College of Fine Arts at the University of New South Wales.
