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where Hao Boyi from the Great Northern Wilderness Printmaking Studio was in charge. Shen was one of the chosen few allowed to do oil painting.
To mark the thirtieth anniversary of Mao Zedong’s May 1942 Yan’an Forum on Literature and Art, Madam Mao (a.k.a. Jiang Qing) organized the First National Art Exhibition in 1972. Shen’s entry, Tasting Snow on the Wanda Mountains, was entered in provincial and military-region exhibitions. At the time, it was announced that in October 1974 the Second National Art Exhibition would take place to emphasize that workers, peasants, and soldiers had mounted the stage in the nation’s superstructure. Following all the guidelines stipulated for paintings, Shen completed his painting Standing Guard for Our Great Motherland in July 1974, and in September he was notified it had been selected. Taking leave and paying his own expenses to Beijing, he saw that his work had been hung in the most prominent position at the National Art Museum of China (NAMOC) but was deeply shocked to see that the two soldiers in the painting had been reworked. Both now had fuller faces, ruddy complexions, and fierce expressions. The work was collected by NAMOC without remuneration for the painter; it was published nationwide in newspapers and magazines, and 200,000 propaganda posters of it were distributed to work units. Shen’s achievement was disparagingly acknowledged at his workplace with a third-class merit, and he was not recommended for further study when universities reopened in 1975.
Mao Zedong’s death in 1976 was followed by Jiang Qing’s arrest, presumably to deflect blame from Chairman Mao for the excesses of the Cultural Revolution. That Jiang Qing had approved of Standing Guard for Our Great Motherland meant repercussions for Shen Jiawei. In 1977, his father was incarcerated in his workplace prison for one year without explanation, probably because he had proudly hung a poster of his son’s painting next to his desk at work. Worse was yet to come … In 1981, Shen was told that NAMOC had returned his painting to the Heilongjiang Provincial Artists Association in Harbin. When he went the following year to collect his painting, it was in a pile of rubbish in the storage