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space, and he could see it was badly damaged. Too afraid to unwrap the “politically contaminated” work, he took it to Shenyang, where it remained under his bed for twenty years.
In 1997, Guggenheim Museum in New York asked to borrow the work for its “China: 5000 Years” exhibition in New York City and Bilboa in 1998, so Shen was goaded into action. Having relocated to Sydney in early 1989, he quickly had the painting brought to Sydney where he worked alongside conservators at the Art Gallery of New South Wales (AGNSW) to restore the painting to its original form. In 2009, Standing Guard for Our Great Motherland sold in Beijing for US$1 million at China Guardian Auctions. The private collector subsequently established the Long Museum in Shanghai in 2012, and the painting has since been on permanent display. This work that is inextricably linked to the history of the Cultural Revolution was almost lost to China, but it has now taken its rightful place alongside other of Shen’s large-scale visual narrations of China’s modern history. NAMOC has collected Shen’s Red Star over China (1987), and the National Museum of China (NMC) has collected his Wounds: The Story of Dr. Norman Bethune (1984) and his Tolerance (1988). In Australia, the White Rabbit Gallery in Sydney that specializes in Chinese art created since 2000 has collected Shen’s Absolute Truth (2000) and his 1972 Imperial Palanquin: After Yan Liben (2002). Shen’s large-scale works Third World (2002) and Merdeka (2008) are meditations on human history that are held in private collections in Malaysia. His visual narrations of Chinese history often involve hundreds of portraits of historical personalities, as in the case of his six-panel work Revolution (2009–2012), that is the first part of a larger three-part work titled Brothers and Sisters.
The summary just discussed attempts to give some idea of the extent of Shen’s musing on China’s modern history, as well as his own place in one of the most turbulent eras of human history. This book is a memoir that discusses in detail a selection of his most important historical paintings, why he wanted to paint these works, and the extraordinary circumstances