Shen Jiawei / 沈嘉蔚

Artist 沈嘉蔚 / Shen Jiawei was born in Shanghai. A farmer, soldier and propaganda artist during the 1960s and 1970s in China, he later studied at the Central Academy of Fine Arts in Beijing (1982-1984). His early oil painting Standing Guard For Our Great Motherland 1974 became an icon of those early years and was later shown in New York at the Guggenheim Museum (1998) and by the Asia Society Museum (2008). He arrived in Australia in 1989, having first won the China National Art Exhibition Prize five times.

A gifted painter and portraitist of renown, he has been an Archibald Prize finalist fourteen times (including once as runner-up in 1997) and the winner of the Mary MacKillop Art Award (1995), the Sulman Prize (2006) and the Gallipoli Art Award (2016). He has been commissioned by the Australian Government to paint official portraits for the Governor-General, the Prime Minister, Speakers and HRH Crown Princess of Denmark. Best-known for his complex history paintings, his works are represented in public and private collections in Australia and throughout the world including, the Vatican art collection and the National Museum, the National Art Museum and the National Military Museum in Beijing.

For Silent Dialogue / 沉默的对话, Shen presents three of his distinctive history paintings, the preoccupation of his long and successful career, featuring three significant individuals in the history of this country. 

Gubbo Thomas / 格布•汤玛斯 1999 depicts prominent Yuin elder Gubbo (also Gubbo) Ted Thomas (1909-2002), who was an influential land rights activist and spiritual leader. Working with the Aboriginal Studies Council to record culturally-significant sacred sites on the coast of New South Wales, he campaigned tirelessly for the protection of country. Through his activism and storytelling over many decades, Gubbo Ted educated people to respect nature, value First Peoples culture and live together in harmony. A lesser-known fact is that Gubbo Ted’s mother was Chinese.

Sydney 1894 No.1 / 悉尼 1894 2006 depicts Mei Quong Tart (1850– 1903), a prominent nineteenth-century Sydney merchant who migrated from China aged 9 with his uncle and was later adopted by a British family. Later in life, he made a significant impact on the social and political scene of Sydney, as a philanthropist and much-loved community leader, at a time of strong anti-Chinese sentiment in Australia. 

Self Portrait with Chinese Morrison/中国的莫理循与我 1996 depicts George Ernest Morrison (1862-1920), a British-Australian journalist and adviser to the Chinese Government, whose book An Australian in China - and later his journalism for The Times - earned him the title of ‘Chinese Morrison’. Morrison left behind him an extraordinary archive of books and photographs of his time in China during the late Qing Dynasty and the early years of the Republic
of China.

Alongside the digital artworks presented here, is a long-form interview with Shen and selected research materials from publicly accessible archives, libraries and websites about the lives of these important individuals. In addition to written records, the interview links to selected photographic and
oral histories.

By presenting textual and non-textual materials, the aim is to present a view of histories that goes beyond the written word, to also explore the legacies of cultural leaders that expressed important ideas through image, story-telling and song. This is in keeping with Shen's ideas and outlook on painting history which seeks to question the way lived reality is typically historicised, especially the history of contact between cultures. 

Featuring an outdoor display of large-scale reproductions of Shen’s paintings in Little Elgin Street Carlton, the exhibit opened on 17 December 2021 and ran until 4 January 2022. On the evening of the 17th, we celebrated with an opening event. Attendees toured the show and listened to 陳雋然 / Chun Yin Rainbow Chan’s soundscape commissioned for the project. This was followed by a keynote address by Global & planetary health justice expert
羅南芝 / Dr Selina Lo. We were thrilled to see people enjoying the exhibit over the festive period. We thank our friends at Heart Attack and Vine and the wider Carlton community for supporting our project.

ET— 1) Jiawei, we start with your beautiful painting Gubbo Thomas / 格布•汤玛斯 1999 (pictured above) depicting prominent Yuin elder Gubbo Ted Thomas. Many know of Gubbo’s important life’s work. However, for those who do not, I thought we might firstly share some aspects of his biography, as can be understood from the public records, which is, in the end, one interpretation.

Gubbo Ted Thomas (1909-2002) was born in Jembaicumbene near Braidwood on Yuin country and he grew up on Wallaga Lake Reserve, where his peoples were forcibly contained after European invasion and settlement. Son of Yuin elder Bill Thomas (1888-) and his wife Mary Gwendoline "Linno" Ahoy (1887–1959), Gubbo was born of Aboriginal, Chinese and French lineage. At a time when children were forcibly removed from their families, Gubbo was born and raised amongst his people on country. When he was eight, he embarked upon his Dreamtime walkabout from Mallacoota on the Victorian border to the Hawkesbury River, learning from his elders about his Dreamtime culture and the sacred sites for which he would become custodian. (1)(6)

Gubbo Ted went on to become an influential activist and spiritual leader of his Yuin country.  (1) (2) (3)
(4) (5) (6).

Alongside Aboriginal elder and activist Percy Mumbler and activist Jack Campbell, Gubbo Ted campaigned tirelessly for the title deeds of Yuin tribal lands at Wallaga Lake to be handed over to the Yuin peoples. After five years of demonstrations and lobbying, in 1978, the title deeds were handed over in perpetuity. The following year, logging activities on nearby Mumbulla Mountain placed sacred Yuin sites at risk, and Gubbo Ted began campaigning to recognise the cultural significance of the mountain – a place where young boys were initiated. (6) (7) (8) (9) After tireless lobbying, in 1984 Mumbulla Mountain was gazetted as an Aboriginal Place. In 2006, there was a complete handover of the Gulaga and Biamanga National Parks to the Yuin people to be jointly managed by Aboriginal owners and the National Parks and Wildlife Service, as Gubbo Ted had envisaged. (2)(6) (9)

Jiawei, it was your connection to a mutual friend, the activist Billy Snow that led to your introduction to Gubbo Ted. Coupled with Gubbo Ted's extraordinary life story as a spiritual leader and activist, it was also your sense of shared cultural heritage that drew you to make his painting as his mother was Chinese. Can you tell us some more?

ET— 2) Jiawei, Gubbo Ted was known as a gentle activist and a spiritual innovator with a deep desire to build bridges and bring people from different cultures together in harmony. He espoused a return to ancient values and mutual love and respect for Mother Earth and Aboriginal culture. In the stories of his activism and leadership, his capacity for humour and the way he expressed himself in a very loving and energetic way stands out. I think this sense of his person is also something that you have captured in your story and in your visual representation of him.

When I look at the painting, I am reminded of the stories of his return to country, aged 80. Over six weeks, he re-traced his Dreamtime walkabout from Malacoota to the Hawkesbury River with a group of young First Peoples and a support group. It was a 350-kilometre journey, walked at the time of the so-called “Bicentennial” of this country – another example of the extraordinary strength and fortitude of this First Peoples Elder.

Would you please comment a little more on your experience of sitting with Gubbo Ted? His energy? I love that he shared his song with you, and I know this touched you deeply, despite being in another language. As a painter of what we have come to understand as ‘history’, which is often – but not always - written rather than sung, can you talk a little more about the significance of this experience?

ET— 3) Jiawei, I want to turn now to Sydney 1894 No.1 / 悉尼 1894 2006 (pictured above). The work features Mei Quong Tart (1850– 1903), the prominent nineteenth-century merchant who migrated from China aged nine and became one of Sydney’s best-loved and most respected personalities at a time of strong anti-Chinese sentiment in Australia. (1) (2) (3) (4) (5)

Indeed, in 1901, Mei Quong Tart was depicted as one of 269 significant persons painted by Tom Roberts into the ‘Big picture’ – officially titled The Opening of the First Parliament of the Commonwealth of Australia by His Royal Highness the Duke of Cornwall and York, 9 May 1901 – made to commemorate the occasion of the formation of the Commonwealth of Australia.

In the Children’s Newspaper of 1889, the gathering of the day was described thus: 
Tuesday June 20 was a red-letter day in Australian history. It was the day on which the people of New South Wales – the best and wealthiest of the Australian Colonies – had to decide whether they were willing to accept the Federation Bill …

As art historian and curator Dr Nicola Teffer writes in her excellent catalogue essay ‘No Ordinary Man’ for the 2004 Powerhouse Museum exhibition of the same name:

In his time, Quong Tart was one of Sydney’s most famous and well-loved personalities. An immigrant and self-made man, he generously spent his wealth, time and energy on a range of social causes and civic duties, while his network of tea-rooms furnished the city with some its most popular meeting-places… He mediated disputes between the Chinese and [white] Australian communities, petitioned against opium, and provided food to the poor and destitute…His immense popularity was all the more remarkable by the act that Quong Tart was Chinese by birth, and lived in a time when anti-Chinese feeling ran high. 

In 1901 in an effort to limit non-white (particularly Asian) immigration, the notorious Immigration Restriction Act came into effect, requiring immigrants to take a dictation test before being granted entry into the country. The Act and test operated until 1958 after which time other elements of the White Australia policy continued to discriminate against newcomers to this place. It was not until the Racial Discrimination Act 1975 came into effect that it was declared illegal to discriminate against migrants based on their race. 

In your painting, Quong Tart stands alongside his male staff out the front of one of his tearooms in 1890s Sydney. It calls to mind a photograph of the Loong Shan tea rooms (c1889-1903) located at 137 King Street; today part of the Tart McEvoy papers which are held in the collection of the Society of Australian Genealogists, the oldest family history society in Australia.  

Would you tell us about the work's composition, the depiction of the figures in relation to one another and the colour? For me, the colour, in particular, harmonises the work. It expresses a sense of equality between the characters depicted. This sense of equivalency seems fitting as Mei Quong Tart was known for his bipartisanship nature, said to have made him a good employer, well-regarded for his forward-thinking support of workers' rights and conditions. (1) (2) (3) (4) (5) This sense of equality and empowerment is also expressed in the upright stance of the workers who confidently grip their utensils and stand almost shoulder to shoulder with Mei Quong Tart. 

How did you come to make the work – what was it that drew you to research these photographic images?

ET— 4) I want to turn now to the genre of history painting, which has been your long-standing preoccupation over a long and successful career.  In 2007 Sydney 1894 No.1 / 悉尼 1894 2006 was awarded the Sulman Prize, defined by its organiser - The Art Gallery of New South Wales – as follows: 

The Sulman Prize is awarded for the best subject painting, genre painting or mural project by an Australian artist. A genre painting is normally a composition representing some aspect or aspects of everyday life, and may feature figurative, still-life, interior or figure-in-landscape themes. A subject painting, in contrast, is idealised or dramatised. Typically, a subject painting takes its theme from history, poetry, mythology or religion. In both cases, however, the style may be figurative, representative, abstract or semi-abstract.

For our readers/viewers who may be less familiar with academic interpretations of art, this definition is helpful but also underlines one of our tendencies in the West. That is, we tend to rather unequivocally classify humanities under either fiction or non-fiction. History books are considered to be non-fiction, written accounts of lived experiences. And yet, written histories, like history paintings, can often be ambiguous – working to include or exclude certain voices. 

In your book Painting History, you elaborated on this shared sentiment, in which you write: 

In history books – classified as non-fiction – one often sees history paintings that have been created over various centuries. History paintings generally are not treated as works of art but rather as supporting visual documents or supplementary materials for the reader. In fact, before the advent of photography, the primary function of history paintings was to present history visually. However, this does not mean that history paintings do not contain fictional elements. To fictionalise is the prerogative of history painters; otherwise they would not be able to create. 

Jiawei, would you elaborate on this, perhaps reflecting in reference to the fictional elements or sense of ambiguity that you were wanting to explore in the work vis-à-vis how we might think about the photographic record as a record of lived reality?

Note:—Borrow Shen’s brilliant book Painting History: China’s revolution in a global context (edited by Mabel Lee) to deep-dive into the fascinating research and thinking at centre of each of Jiawei’s creations.

ET— 5) Jiawei, Gubbo Ted Thomas' mother, Mary Gwendoline "Linno" Ahoy (1887–1959), was descended from the Chinese of Braidwood. Her father James Ahoy was a market gardener in the area at the time of the gold rush. 

Braidwood is also where Mei Quong Tart began his life in Australia in the Braidwood goldfields area with his Uncle. Later in his life, as we have discussed, Mei Quong Tart organised popular Chinese-style horse races in Jembaicumbene, Gubbo Ted's birthplace and country. So, in some ways, when we look at Sydney 1894 No.1 / 悉尼 1894 2006 and the earlier work of Uncle Gubbo Ted Thomas, there is a pattern of connection that reaches across time, place and culture. Likewise, when one knows a little about Mei Quong Tart (1850-1903) and Morrison (1862-1920) - as cultural leaders and political advisers (Morrison we will elaborate on below) - who are fairly close in age, one is not surprised to find that they knew of one another. 

As I have spent time with the paintings and the research materials, your cross-cultural inquiry into the life stories of these individuals and their intersecting histories have come into firmer focus. All three leaders tried to forge connections across cultures and met with resistance both within and outside their respective communities. But all continued and achieved extraordinary legacies.

As a selected body of works, there is, therefore, a sense of this project – and perhaps it might be said your broader practice – embodying this idea of the artist's struggle. Perhaps, an attempt to express an integrated existence in this country, not literally of course, but a sort of collective consciousness of this place, its people and its history? 

Perhaps this seems to be a rather obvious observation. However, I think for the public, it illuminates the artist's role – in the sense that it underlines the creative and intellectual impulse that drives the work and serves as a vital way of questioning and connecting our stories and ways of being without telling.  

In your research-based painterly approach, are you consciously looking for these sorts of connections in terms of how you approach the subjects of your paintings? Or are these associations fortuitous turns of history that serve to underline the lived reality of this country as a point of contact between migrant cultures – be they Chinese, British or European – on this Aboriginal country?

ET— 6) This brings us to your final painting, Self Portrait with Chinese Morrison 1996 (pictured above), which depicts the Australian journalist and adviser to the Chinese Government at one time George Ernest Morrison (1862-1920). Morrison's book, An Australian in China (1895), a journal of his walk from Shanghai to Rangoon, and later his journalism for The Times - earned him the title of 'Chinese Morrison'. (1) (2) (3) (4)

In 1989, shortly after your arrival in Australia, you discovered Morrison's archive - held as part of the Mitchell Library collection at the State Library of New South Wales. For those who may not know, Morrison left behind him an extraordinary archive of books and photographs of his time in China, documenting several significant events in the history of modern China. (2) (3) (4)

Since the 1960s, there had been extensive research into the Morrison Papers – i.e. Cyril Pearl's Morrison of Peking and The Correspondence of GE Morrison edited by Lo Huimin. However, much scholarly research was based upon written resources and made little use of Morrison's extensive photographic archive. 

Thus began your labour of love to research, paint and publish the history of Morrison's role in the history of the late Qing Dynasty and the early Republic of China through the lens of this visual archive.

Today, three beautiful bilingual volumes exist featuring some 500 photographs from the Morrison Papers that you painstakingly curated and edited for the publication Old China Through GE Morrison’s Eyes (2005). The volumes are titled; Morrison of Peking, Catastrophe at the Turn of the Century, and, Eyewitness of the Reformation.

This tremendous resource traces the history of some of modern history’s most significant events, namely, the Reform Movement of 1898, the Boxer Rebellion of 1900, the Peking Treaty of 1901, the post-Boxer Reforms of the Qing Government, the Russo-Japanese War of 1904, and so on. (1) (2) (3) (4)

Jiawei, what was it about Morrison that first drew you to him and ultimately led to your decision to conduct this extraordinary research and make your painting?

Note:—Borrow Old China Through GE Morrison’s Eyes (2005) here.

In closing, I wanted to turn a little more closely to the artwork, which was inspired by one of Morrison’s photographs below –also the cover of Morrison’s book An Australian in China (pictured below). It was one of the earliest ones taken during his early travels through Western China. The image features Morrison in traditional Chinese dress. Alongside him are a policeman in uniform, a guide, a horseman and two carriers, who travelled together from Chaotung to Talifu.

In volume 1 of Old China Though GE Morrison’s Eyes (2005), the image above is accompanied by a textual description from An Australian in China, Morrison’s book, which reads:

“My men and I had to sleep in the same room. At the inn there was no bedding for my men; they had to cover themselves as best they could, with some pieces of felt brought by the hunchback, and sleep all huddled together from the cold. They ate only twice a day, and then sparingly…what admirable fellows they were. They had a few hardships to put up with, but their lot was a thousand times better than that of hundreds of their countrymen who were dying from hunger as well as from cold”. (p9) 

As the title suggests, the painting is of course a self-portrait and thus unlike the photograph, also depicted in the painting is an image of yourself in modern dress, holding your paints and a copy of the book An Australian in China.

Unlike your depiction of Mei Quong Tart and his employees in Sydney 1894 No.1 / 悉尼 1894 2006, where both the composition and colour express this sense of equality and empowerment between “master” and “servants”, in Self Portrait with Chinese Morrison 1996, the work conveys a slightly different mood.

In the work, the Chinese employees – carriers and the policeman at the left – are depicted in the same reddish brown hue, which has the effect of visually harmonising the narrative shared between the workers. 

Unlike Mei Quong Tart’s employees, the heads of Morrison’s staff are slightly downcast – in the case of the carriers, under the heavy loads suspended from poles on their backs – as they look to the camera for the image to be taken. The policeman’s arms are respectfully folded behind his back. 

There is a feeling of deference and disempowerment, at least on the part of the carriers, that expresses the divide between master and servant class, notwithstanding Morrison’s sensitive remarks above and well-documented respect and love of China – its peoples and culture. 

The social divide is perhaps more keenly felt through the colours of the work. Specifically, the opulent blue colour of Morrison’s traditional Chinese dress which at once connects and distinguishes him from his travelling companions. Through colour a connection is also felt between Morrison and you as painter of his photographic history.

At the same time, the contrasting dresses – you in contemporary Western dress and Morrison in traditional Chinese dress - creates a tension; setting the two of you – your presences – apart and re-harmonising Morrison with his Chinese companions of another time and place. For me the colour composition of the work is utterly compelling.

Would you respond a little to this interpretation? Secondarily, would you elaborate a little on where you see your self-portrait sitting as part of this narrative, perhaps in the context of this idea of a “third type of history painting” which you have spoken of?