The Institute for Australian and Chinese Arts and Culture (IAC) at Western Sydney University is excited to present this new exhibition entitled History Reimagined: Shen Jiawei and NC Qin, bringing together two outstanding artists of different backgrounds, using different mediums, to show their fascinating and intriguing representations and explorations of history in their artistic creations. NC Qin, a young and successful artist specialising in glass sculpture and conceptual art, is first-generation Australian-born Chinese. Her artistic pursuit is intertwined with her identity formation. Embracing her Chinese heritage, she also interrogates and explores the hidden burden of cultural heritage within the Asian diaspora. She turns fragile glass into armour in her sculpture Glass Armour, inspired by her interest in Chinese history, in particular historical and legendary heroes from the Three Kingdoms period, depicted in Romance of The Three Kingdoms, a 14th-century historical novel. Embedded in the sculpture are handcrafted images of Guan Yu and Zhang Fei, which, despite their deification as guardian gods, reveal their fatal flaws of pride and wrath, challenging traditional glorification of values of honour and pride. Her performance art video, in which the artist wears the glass armour in the nude and holds its 80kg weight on her shoulders until muscle failure, takes her exploration and interrogation into another sphere. Her new work, a series of images of prints, thoughtfully selected from the performance video, frame and freeze those tender and sensual moments of emotion into an eternal gaze. Shen Jiawei, one of Australia’s best known master portraitists, was born and grew up in China. He was a well-established oil painting artist in China where his painting Standing Guard for Our Great Motherland (1974) became an icon, although the incredible twists and turns that the painting has gone through present a piece of very interesting human and art history of its own. Shen moved to Australia in 1989 and became a highly successful and sought-after portraitist who painted the official portraits of Princess Mary of Denmark (2005), Prime Minister John Howard (2009), Pope Frances (2013), and Australian Governor General Sir Peter Cosgrove (2018). But Shen Jiawei’s lifelong interest and artistic pursuit are history painting, particularly large-scale history paintings, to capture history’s depth and complexity. The way he represents history in his artworks is quite unique and requires reflection from a contemporary and fresh angle. In his Sulman Prize- winning work, Peking Treaty (2006), he transposes Mantegna’s foreshortened Christ to the empty centre of the large Peking Treaty table where Eastern and Western diplomats negotiate a settlement of the Boxer Revolution. Most excitingly, this exhibition shows for the first time ever a print of Shen’s masterpiece, The Tower of Babel (2023), an epic artwork 20 years in the making that recreates an alternative art history of the 20th century by tracing the biggest movement of all: the International Communist Movement. The whole work consists of 90 panels, with remixes of over 100 original artworks and containing 400 individual portraits of historical characters on four murals entitled respectively “Utopia”, “Internationale”, “Gulag” and “Saturnus”. The biggest and central piece is “Utopia” which has Pieter Bruegel’s Tower of Babel as the framework with the design of Tatlinʼs Tower on the top. The Tower of Babel is a visual history of the political and art movements of the 20th century, reimagined and curated by the artist Shen Jiawei. Biographies Shen Jiawei Jiawei Shen, born in Shanghai, became a well-known artist in China in the mid-1970s. His oil painting Standing Guard for Our Great Motherland (1974) became an icon in China and was later shown in New York twice at the Guggenheim Museum in 1998, and Asia Society Museum in 2008. In 2009 it was auctioned at Beijing Guardian for the price of one million US dollars. Now it is in the collection of the Long Museum in Shanghai. From 1982 to 1984, he studied at the Central Academy of Fine Arts in Beijing, and later became a professional artist in Shenyang. He won the National Art Exhibition Prize in China five times. In 1989 Jiawei Shen moved to Australia and for the first three years had to support himself financially by drawing portrait sketches for tourists at Darling Harbour. He later became a leading portraitist in Australia and internationally. He was commissioned to paint official portraits for Princess Mary of Denmark (2005), Prime Minister John Howard (2009), Pope Frances (2013), and Australian Governor General Sir Peter Cosgrove (2018). Since 1993, Jiawei Shen’s portrait paintings have been a finalist in the Archibald Prize at the Art Gallery NSW fourteen times, and he was runner-up in 1997. He has also been a finalist in the Doug Moran Portrait Prize (1994, 1996, 2006, 2007 and 2017) and has twice won third prize in the Sydney Royal Art Show (1993 and 1994). In 1995 he won the Mary McKillop Art Award and received a medal from Pope John Paul II. In 2006, he won the Sir John Sulman Prize for Peking Treaty, and in 2016 won the Gallipoli Art Prize for Yeah, Mate! Jiawei Shen has made a reputation for his large history paintings. In his Australian epic, At the Turn of Century (1998), there were more than 100 individual portraits of historical figures; in his Malaysian epic Merdeka (2008), 260 individual portraits; and in his Chinese epic Brothers and Sisters (2010-2017), more than 450 individual portraits. His recently completed monumental work, The Tower of Babel, an epic project of four large-scale mural paintings that was 20 years in the making, features more than 400 historical characters as well as remixes of 130 iconic artworks. Jiawei Shen has eight works in the collections of the National Portrait Gallery and the Parliament House in Canberra. In China, he has eighteen works in the collections of the National Museum, the National Art Museum, and the National Military Museum in Beijing. His portrait of Pope Frances is in the Vatican Art Collection. NC Qin NC Qin is an Australian artist and curator who grew up in the 90s in Sydney, graduated from Sydney College of the Arts in 2015 with a Bachelor of Arts degree and continued her study of visual arts across Australia, China and the USA. Qin has become known for working with cast glass, an incredibly time consuming and labour-intensive process. Her work has been collected both nationally and internationally. NC Qin uses her primary medium of glass to prompt conversations on heritage and values. Her work alludes to global epics and philosophies that reflect her interests as a Chinese Australian woman as she explores how myths change the value systems of today. She has exhibited in spaces such as Arts House Melbourne, Bankstown Art Centre, Griffith Regional Gallery, Fisher Library, Rookwood Cemetery’s HIDDEN walk, 541 Art Space and Gosford Regional Gallery. Her series “Head Case” was exhibited at and collected by the National Museum of Art as the winner of the Emerging Art Glass Prize 2020, as well as the Ashmolean Museum of Art and Architecture (Oxford, UK) as a finalist of IDENTITY 2019: an art and design prize. In 2021, Qin was commissioned by Gallery Lane Cove with a solo exhibition as part of the Lunar North Confluence, a program that connected Art Space on the Concourse, Incinerator Art Space and Macquarie University Gallery. Her work Portal went on to win the Vicki Torr Prize 2021. In 2022, she went on to be a finalist of numerous art prizes and was featured in a micro documentary by EST media. In 2023, she completed a public art sculpture for Chatswood's Inner Edge Drifting exhibition as well as performed Glass Armour in Melbourne's Arts House as part of the Okkoota exhibition. In 2024 Qin collaborated with director Will Suen to film the Glass Armour Performance which debuted at Casula Powerhouse for the exhibition FROM FIRE. This performance revolves around a durational performance in which the artist wears a suit of glass armour weighing 80kgs until muscular failure. The armour, created through a painstaking glass process, is overflowing with Chinese history, symbolism, narrative and cultural values. Qin is represented by Art Atrium, Sydney.