Shen Jiawei

Shen Jiawei (born 1948) is a Chinese-Australian painter. He is a winner of the 2006 Sir John Sulman Prize.

Life and work Shen Jiawei was born in Shanghai. He was in his final year of high school when the Cultural Revolution was launched in 1967. With the country's art universities closed, Jiawei instead chose to join the Red Guards and, later, the People’s Liberation Army. While in the PLA, he became a propaganda artist. He painted his best known work from this period, "Standing Guard for Our Great Motherland", while serving in Heilongjiang province in 1974. The piece was exhibited at the National Art Museum in Beijing later that year, where it received praise from Jiang Qing, the wife of Mao Zedong,

In the 1980s, Shen made several history paintings, including Red Star over China (1987), which portrayed figures associated with the Long March, and Tolerance (1988), which depicted thinkers from the early Chinese Nationalist movement. Because Shen chose to include individuals in his paintings who had been removed from official accounts, he faced some pushback from authorities. In 1995, Shen won the Mary MacKillop Art Award and received a medal from Pope John Paul II. Since the 1990s, Jiawei has competed a number of pieces for the Catholic Church. Other pieces includeThe Third World (2002), which depicts 92 important non-Western figures from the 20th century (including Mao, Mother Teresa, Osama bin Laden, Pol Pot, Imelda Marcos and Che Guevara), and Merdeka (2007), a "14-metre-long panorama of Malaysian history" containing 261 figures. He painted the first official portrait of Pope Frances.

Family Shen's wife, Lan Wang, is also a painter and sculptor. Their daughter, Xini, was born in 1989 at the start of the Tiananmen Square protests. He was an Archibald Prize finalist in 1993, 1994, 1995, 1996, 1997, 1998, 1999, 2002, 2004, 2005, 2006, 2011, 2012 and 2015.

Shen Jiawei's art "Yalda Our Girl" was selected for 8th Beijing International Art Biennale China 2019.