Time: 6:00 pm – 7:00 pm AEDT
Date: 23 March 2023
Location: Chau Chak Wing Museum University Place Camperdown, NSW 2006
Chinese Australian artists duo Jiawei Shen and Lan Wang, will join China Studies Centre Director Professor David Goodman and Chau Chak Wing Museum Curator Dr Shuxia Chen, sharing their personal endeavours on artistic practice amid late Cultural Revolution when art served politics in this discussion.
About the speakers
Jiawei Shen was born in Shanghai in 1948 and moved to Australia in 1989. Largely self-taught, he became a well-known artist in China in the mid-1970s during the Cultural Revolution. As a leading portraitist, Jiawei Shen was commissioned by the Australian government to paint official portraits for Pope Frances (2013), Princess Mary of Denmark (2005) and previous Prime Minister John Howard (2009). Jiawei has works in the collections of the National Portrait Gallery, and Parliament House. In China, he has works in the collections of the National Museum, the National Art Museum, the National Military Museum, and the Long Museum.
Lan Wang was born in Beijing in 1953. She studied art in the Luxun Academy of Fine Arts from 1977, and as a lecturer taught there since 1982. A member of the Artists Association of China, she got Master of Fine Arts in 1989, and move to Sydney in 1991. In 2006-08, Lan with her husband Shen Jiawei and fellow artist Wang Xu created a large scale epic painting of Malaysian history Merdeka. Four of her works are in the collection of the National Art Museum of China.
Professor David S G Goodman is Director of the China Studies Centre at the University of Sydney, where he is also Emeritus Professor of Chinese Politics. His research has concentrated on local social and political change in China though he has also written on China’s colonial experience; elite level politics in the CCP; the social history of the CCP before 1949; contemporary Chinese literature; and China’s international relations. Recent publications include the two-volume Class and the Communist Party of China (2022) (together with Marc Blecher, Yingjie Guo, Jean-Louis Rocca, Tony Saich and Beibei Tang); China Impact: Threat Perception in the Asia-Pacific Region (2019) (with Shigetsu Sonoda); and the Handbook of the Politics of China (2015).
Dr Shuxia Chen is an art historian and curator. Her research concerns the relationship between visual art, society and politics in China, particularly the role of photography in forming new understandings of the transversal space between state and the cultural-intellectual classes in the socialist and post-socialist era.
Header image: Lan Wang Welcoming Spring, 1974, woodcut on paper, 38 x 35.5 cm. Courtesy of the artist.
