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.
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.
With Welcome to Babel arriving in Australian cinemas on November 14, Nick L’Barrow spoke with the documentary’s director, James Bradley, about the 7 year journey of making this film, and the interesting revelations he discovered about what went on during the Chinese Cultural Revolution.
Nick: Thank you for taking the time to chat, James! As someone who didn’t know a lot about Jiawei Shen and his work, this is such a fascinating documentary. But I’m curious to know how the narrative of Welcome to Babel evolved from the first time you met him, and then over the 7-year process of filming?
James Bradley: Well, I first met him at a screening of a previous documentary I made on another Chinese artist, and that was in 2012 at Sydney University. And I had never even heard of him before, even though in the Chinese community he’s really famous! But he loved that documentary, and after a few meetings, he started to tell me about this big project he had called ‘The Tower of Babel’. And, you know, it was hard to understand because of how monumental and full of characters it was.
So, he asked me if I could make a documentary about it. And my wife, who is from Hong Kong, went down to meet him and his wife in his old home where he had been for 15 years. He had this studio which was a converted garage so it could have double the height. He was working on another painting, but not one as big as ‘Babel’, called ‘Brothers and Sisters’.
So, we decided to start filming because I could already tell that it was going to be a great story. He had this monumental project that he wanted to make, that he didn’t know when it was going to be finished. He thought it was going to be years! First of all, he had to build a new house and studio to fit it in, and that hadn’t even started by the time we started filming. It was a very long process, and we just kept filming him and his wife along the way.
Nick: Jiawei and his wife, Lan Wang, and their relationship is just as much a foundation in the narrative, as much as the painting is. They’re so entertaining to watch on screen. Do you remember the moment that you realised there was something special between them that would be included in this documentary?
James Bradley: I definitely saw it quite often. But, the first time I think we really captured it was the scene where they’re looking at photos of their youths during the Cultural Revolution, and they’re discussing where they each were in different places of the same area of northeast China. There were a lot of photos from that time.
And you know, they have fantastic banter. Whether they are arguing about what year it was, where it was, or even who was there! The best one was when there was a photo of him in the mountains, and he was carrying a bandsaw across his shoulders, and he explained that he was there cutting all this wood. And she just jumped in a said he was actually only there for a few days for recreation! That he was showing off and pretending.
There are a few moments like that in the film that everybody laughs at, because it’s classic them. We saw it quite often, and their relationship’s quite lovely in that they do play that kind of banter-filled game.
Nick: Their relationship just adds this really beautiful layer of substance to the story! There is a line Shen says in the film about using his art to find what the truth is and preserve it. I’m curious to know, especially as a documentary filmmaker, what role does telling stories like Shen’s in this format have in pursuing and preserving truths?
James Bradley: Yeah… it’s an interesting question, because our documentary is mainly observational. It’s observing what’s actually happening. But, of course, even in this most observational of films, editing still comes it to it. It’s rare that a documentary film is made where people don’t direct their subjects in some way.
I think out film is a mix. Some of it is purely observational. Some scenes, like the opening scene, was kind of constructed, but it came from something that Shen does all the time. It was a perfect shot where we had the drone, it was sunset. And we had to also wait a few days for the weather and rain to clear up.
We definitely did find the truth in what they were saying though. I did let them tell their truths. I really tried not to impose my viewpoint on the film. I didn’t live through the Cultural Revolution. I saw it from a distance of thousands of kilometres away in Australia. I remember seeing news footage of it on TV. But I wanted them to tell their story.
And that was a conversation I had with my editor too. We had to cut this movie from hundreds of hours of footage. But it was really about finding the motivation behind what Jiawei was doing. He says that this work was a culmination of his whole life’s work. He spent years dedicated to this. So, we had to look at his background, and her background. It was only as we were filming that we found out that they had such different experiences during the Cultural Revolution.
Nick: You mentioned observing the Cultural Revolution from a distance and on TV here in Australia. Was there a particular thing that interested you or stood out that you didn’t know about that time in China that was revealed through Shen telling his story?
James Bradley: One thing that did stick out was the Red Guards. I mean, Jiawei was a Red Guard that eventually denounced communism when Tiananmen Square happened in 1989. But, I always thought a Red Guard was being a PLA solider, part of the military. But it wasn’t. It was completely separate. It was Mao Zedong who announced the Red Guard as a way of staying in power and combating his political enemies.
He told all of these high school and university students to go out and destroy the old culture. Destroy temples, punish older people, especially academics or teachers. Anybody who was in authority. The whole country went mad. They were gangs. It was chaos.
Jiawei told a story about how his group of Red Guard’s were formed by some mates of his from school, and they wanted to try and prevent the violence that was going on. But then they got attacked by another mob of Red Guard’s, and it was the PLA who protected Jiawei. They defended him from getting beaten up. The chaos of that time was incredible.
Thank you to James for his time, and to TM Publicity for organising the interview. Welcome to Babel is in Australian cinemas November 14.
