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Film SYNOPSIS
Renowned Chinese-Australian artist Jiawei Shen is completing an extraordinary and monumental artwork that he says gives meaning to his whole life. This former Red Guard, still famous in China for painting one of the most famous images of the Cultural Revolution, “Standing Guard For The Great Motherland”, is creating a fantastic parable of the history of Communism in the style that has established him as one of the world’s great history painters.
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Epic in concept and scale and painted over 7 years, his ‘Tower of Babel’ masterpiece is an enormous 4 panel work of 130 square meters and 7.5 meters in height. It depicts over 400 famous and infamous characters including politicians, soldiers, scientists, artists, writers and filmmakers who were won over by the utopian vision of the Communist movement, as well as many forgotten people who tragically lost their lives to Revolution. It also includes remixes of over 100 iconic artworks by left wing artists including Picasso, Matisse, Léger, Diego Rivera and Frida Kahlo in an immersive artwork that totally surrounds the viewer in his vast 3-story studio in Bundeena, just outside of Sydney.
As Jiawei’s masterpiece progresses, he and his artist wife Lan Wang tell their own stories of lives shared with millions of others in Mao’s China through the Great Famine and the Cultural Revolution, before the traumatic events of June 1989 in Tiananmen Square saw them settle in Australia.
Welcome To Babel puts an intimate and human face to an extraordinary couple and the story of their generation in China and Australia. And asks whether the present can learn from the past.
FROM THE DIRECTOR – James Bradley
Ever since Jiawei Shen first told me in April 2012 about his ambitious and slightly crazy plan to paint a monumental Tower of Babel that tells the history of world Communism, I’ve been fascinated by this project. We started filming with Jiawei and family in December of that year and have since become entwined in their lives.
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I had previously visited China numerous times with my wife Cathy Li (RIP), and we had filmed there with artist Zhou Xiaoping for my film Ochre and Ink (2011). Later in 2015 we received time critical funding to shoot in Beijing with Jiawei and family at the Beijing Art Biennale and other significant locations.
The story of Jiawei & Lan’s lives, from growing up during the Cultural Revolution in Mao’s China, their unlikely relationship, and their migration to Australia in the late 1980s, is representative of many Chinese-Australians, but particularly engaging due to their great artistic talents and illustrious reputations. Through their own personal stories and Jiawei’s Tower of Babel, we can experience the dramatic and often traumatic world of 20th Century Communism, from the inside. From visions of Socialist Utopia through extraordinary adventures and profound comradeship, to misery in the frozen Gulag, we get a window into the lives of many millions of people.
While the subject matter is serious, Jiawei and Lan tell their stories with a lot of humour, expressing the absurdity of life in Revolutionary China, where so little made sense to the people themselves who had to live through times of constant tumultuous change. There is also a lot of surreal humour in Jiawei’s Tower of Babel, as famous personalities, artworks, love stories and battles jostle for space on the walls of his massive studio, hidden in the sleepy NSW coastal town of Bundeena.
Welcome To Babel is a rare opportunity to experience art and history in a film that incorporates drama and entertainment through multifaceted story-telling with great production values, lensed by Peter Coleman, with brilliant editing by Karen Johnson and a magnificent music score by Caitlin Yeo.
FROM THE PRODUCER – Graeme Isaac
Welcome To Babel is a story that works on a number of different levels. In addition to the ‘arts’ content - the execution of Jiawei’s massive new work filmed over 7 years and the references within it to over 100 famous works by other artists – the painting also deals with a history or totalitarianism made suddenly more relevant by the war in the Ukraine and by the increasing tensions between China and the West.
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Jiawei and his artist wife Lan have lived this history, and their own biographical journey through it provides the opportunity to bring the history to life in a personal and accessible way. It is a story familiar to many of the 1.4 million Chinese people who now call Australia home, but one rarely told on film.
Jiawei Shen is not unknown. He is regarded as the elder statesman of Chinese artists in Australia, known for being a pioneer of oil painting in China, a legendary propaganda artist, and as the first truly successful Chinese portraitist in Australia. He has painted the Prime Minister, the Pope, the Governor General, Princess Mary, was the winner of the prestigious Sulman art prize in 2006, and has been elected as a finalist in the Archibald 14 times. (The $100k Archibald Prize is the most prestigious portrait prize in Australia, with an annual attendance in excess of 130,000). He is a highly promotable figure both to arts audiences and to Chinese-Australians.
We hope that Jiawei and Lan’s story can make a valuable contribution to a better understanding of the complexity and cultural richness of the Chinese population in Australia, and also to highlighting the contribution of an important Chinese-Australian artist to our cultural life. Jiawei’s ambition is to paint a unique and significant masterpiece that he believes only he can paint, and only in Australia, where freedom of thought and self-expression has enabled him to conceive of and undertake what he called his ‘mission’.
The film was shot in 4k, and with production values commensurate with theatrical release, and with a beautiful underscore by composer Caitlin Yeo.
JAWEI SHEN:
Life and work
Jiawei Shen was born in 1948 in a small rural village outside of Shanghai. He joined the Communist Party at a young age and during the Cultural Revolution became a Red Guard and a revolutionary artist, and was posted to the Russian border in the far North. His 1974 painting Standing Guard For The Great Motherland, turned into a poster by Madam Mao and sent all over China, became one of the iconic works of that era. It held pride of place in the Guggenheim’s 1998 “China 5000 Years” exhibition in New York and Bilbao, and is now held in the prestigious Long Museum in Shanghai.
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Jiawei immigrated to Australia in 1989, resigning as a member of the Chinese Communist Party at the time of Tienanmen but remaining a highly respected figure in the Chinese art world. He is now also one of Australia's leading portrait artists, known for the academic and literary qualities of his works. He has won numerous major art awards in Australia including the Mary MacKillop Art Award, the Doug Moran Portrait Prize and the Sir John Suliman Prize, and has been a finalist in Australia’s premiere portrait award the Archibald a record 14 times. He has been commissioned by the Australian National Portrait Gallery and Australian Federal Parliament House to paint portraits of celebrities, including the Danish Crown Princess Mary (2005), the Australian Prime Minister John Howard (2009) and Governor General Sir Peter Cosgrove (2018). His portrait of Pope Francis (2013) is in the Vatican collection.
However, Jiawei’s true passion is history, and he is a painter of large-scale history pictures represented in many major public collections including the National Art Gallery of China, the Museum of the Chinese Revolution in Beijing, the National Military Museum in China and the Australian War Memorial in Canberra. In collaboration with his wife Lan Wang, he also painted the 14 metre long masterwork “Merdeka” celebrating 50 years of Malaysian independence and housed in the National Art Gallery Of Malaysia.
Visit Jiawei and Lan's Studio
On the first Sunday of every month, Jiawei and Lan open their Bundeena studios to visitors. For more information, visit the Bundeena Art Trail.
LAN WANG
Lan Wang was born in Beijing in 1953. Her family suffered greatly during the Cultural Revolution because her academic father, like all academics, was labeled as a class enemy.
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At the age of 16 Lan was sent to work as a farm labourer in China's Great Northern Wilderness for nine years. Despite the handicap of her family background and though her own artistic talents she managed to eventually gain entry to the Lu-Xun Academy of Fine Art in Shenyang where she studied print making and where she met Jiawei. Lan went on to be part of the famous Shenyang print making collective and to teach at the Academy, and for a period was better known in China than Jiawei himself.
A painter, printmaker and woodcarver, Lan's work has been included in solo and group exhibitions and is held in private and public collections, including the National Art Museum of China in Beijing. Lan Wang is a founding member of the Art Trail of Bundeena, south of Sydney, and along with Jiawei regularly opens her studio for visitors
Visit Jiawei and Lan's Studio
On the first Sunday of every month, Jiawei and Lan open their Bundeena studios to visitors. For more information, visit the Bundeena Art Trail.
screenings & downloads
watch it:
Screening soon in Australian cinemas. Check locations for updates.
Get resources:
Download the official media pack and study guide for more information.