Review in Le Nouvel Obs, France

Jiawei Shen paints a martyr of the Cultural Revolution

"The Colours of the Revolution", so far, so close

 By Guillaume Loison

Published on October 2, 2024 (Translated from French)

Director James Bradley retraces the atypical career of Shen Jiawei, an official painter of the Mao regime before going into exile in Australia, disgusted by the repression of students in Tiananmen Square.

He makes less noise than Ai Weiwei, the most famous dissident artist of the Xi Jinping regime, but his paintings also tell the story of communism, its ghosts, its monsters, its blind spots as well as its heroic figures and its fallen hopes.

Shen Jiawei has just completed his life's work, a monumental fresco embracing the four dimensions of this ideology to which he was nurtured since his (almost) first breath. "The Tower of Babel", an audacious inverted blasphemy whose long and meticulous elaboration is captured by James Bradley's film, is both a mausoleum and an iconic and deadly inventory. Lenin, Che Guevara, Sartre and other great Marxist figures are clustered on a section of wall, framed by tortured and skeletal bodies, the victims of the great famines caused by the Maoist Great Leap Forward, so many "communists sacrificed by other communists," Shen Jiawei deciphers.

Further on, we recognize the biblical reference of the work, this unfinished pantheon adorned with reproductions of illustrious paintings signed by craftsmen...