Begin Again: Shen Jingdong

The Timely Art of Shen Jing Dong

By Charles A. Riley II, PhD

Director, Nassau County Museum of Art

If you read music, you know the notation DC (da capo) which directs the performer to begin again, literally “from the head” or, as jazz players like to say, “take it from the top.” Surrounded by these genial heads, ostensibly as uniform as military garb but on closer inspection distinguishable in their details, you will get the idea of how art returns us to a place of origin.  These are not mechanical abstractions. Once you meet Shen Jing Dong and see him crack one of his frequent smiles over a shared joke, the clarity of the self-portraiture subtly introduces the vitally important individual touch that separates Shen, in my view, from other artists who tend to multiple variations on the theme of portraiture and who might otherwise seem to bear a similarity to him (Warhol, Nara, Murakami). Either on the level of pictorial detail (the band aid, the pupils of the eyes, a patch of white highlight on nose or cheek as in the double portrait Those Years) or facture (the touch of a trained painter, as in the way he cuts his ultramarine blue with streaks of white in Rose Flower, which also laces the white of the cast with streaks of blue) these are expressionist paintings. As with the great figures of Viennese Modernism, the Blaue Reiter collective in Munich, and the CoBrA group (Copenhaghen, Brussels and Amsterdam), all of whom pioneered the close conveyance of deeply personal inner states through vigorous brush strokes and especially via the utterly individual choices involved in setting a palette, Shen unleashes inner feelings with deft technique. Although we will see why he is more closely related to Chinese traditions than these Western affinities that, as an art historian, I feel obliged to mention for the benefit of New York viewers, I will say that among these historical figures Shen reminds me most of Franz Marc, Else Fischer-Hansen and Karel Appel (one look at his painting Questioning Children will demonstrate my point).

The thematic matters here are both intrinsically Chinese and at the same time universal, starting with the paintings of soldiers. Shen carves an original and brilliant path to a thorny topic. The home-friendly magazine Reader’s Digest (my grandfather gave me a subscription and we would read it together) featured a long-running section called “Humor in Uniform.” Like Shen’s work, it tapped a significant psychological method for coping with the traumatic dangers of war, much as the popular American television shows of the 1960s (when Shen was still in training with the PLA) such as Hogan’s Heroes, McHale’s Navy and (later) MASH poked fun at the stupidity of officers and warmly celebrated the camaraderie of the enlisted men, the “band of brothers” mentality that is one of the most appealing aspects of Shen’s art, colorful interpretations of those small black and white photographs so familiar to Chinese families of a certain generation showing the new recruit in his green cap and tunic, the red star pinned to the front, sheepishly grinning with a certain pride because, when Shen was young and serving, being in the PLA was a point of pride (and source of security) for rural families during the decade-long Cultural Revolution, an agonizing period of dire poverty and political turmoil. The political art of the red era celebrated a group of “revolutionary” heroes whose legacy continued for decades. Even in the 1980s when I lived in Hebei province, where Dong Cunrui sacrificed himself at the age of 19 in a battle against the Kuomintang in 1948 at a bridge in Longhua county, it was common for parents and bosses to exhort their charges to “imitate Lei Feng.” As Shen says, “People who were born in 1950s and 1960s have lived through the Red Era, and heroes like Lei Feng, Huang Jiguang, and Dong Cunrui have become their enduring memory. My creation of the series, in fact, is [an] exploration of the people’s memory of that time. My works will revive their memory of heroes and thus start an interaction and communication between my works and the viewers. It is communication of people living in different times and places.” That is how art crosses barriers of time and place.

One reason to admire Shen’s forthright, somewhat naïve interpretive take on a vexed era in Chinese history (there is no overstating the grievous pain of that disaster) is the opportunity it offers to both Chinese and “foreigners” to learn about recent (the scars are still visible) history of a people who have, in fact, made near-impossible strides to climb out of economic austerity and restore a semblance of artistic prosperity within a single generation. The very existence of Crossing Gallery is testimony to the incredible development.

For Western connoisseurs of the arts, Shen’s touchingly human invocation of military life brings to mind a deep current of great art, literature and film-making that portrays war from the individual soldier’s perspective, such as the classic novels of Erich Maria Remarque (All Quiet on the Western Front, Ford Maddox Ford (The Good Soldier, the poetry of Wilfred Owen and Siegfried Sassoon and Joseph Heller’s Catch 22. These poignant (and often funny) literary works join the music of Igor Stravinsky’s irresistibly whimsical L’Histoire du Soldat and the art of both Fernand Leger (who fought in the trenches during World War I) and Henry Moore, or the satirical films of Charlie Chaplin and Roberto Benigni’s Life is Beautiful. Among Chinese novelists, both Ha Jin and the Nobel-prize winning Mo Yan have offered irreverent and brutally candid fictional accounts of military service. During a richly inter-disciplinary discussion of his work with me and co-curator Lydia Duanmu Li just before this exhibition opened in New York, the artist acknowledged a close connection between his own sense of the absurd and the work of Mo Yan, particularly the humorous passages as well as the pathos of Red Sorghum, which Zhang Yimou made into an extraordinary and internationally celebrated movie starring Gong Li. We also discussed the use of humor in Lu Xun’s classic Story of Ah Q (Ah Q Zheng Zhuan) a tremendous example of Modern literature that takes aim at Shen’s powerful theme of the downtrodden anti-hero, a Chaplinesque figure who scores spiritual victories even when he is humiliated.

Working in a humorous vein, Shen finds ways to make the plight of his little guy all the more empathetic. What’s so funny about art? Ask such Western artists as Goya, Daumier, Koons or John Baldessari, who send up the serious historical tradition of the portrait bust of the “great man” (so often military) set on pedestals from the Romans to the Russians, that pompous rhetoric of the glorious leader. Although I was never attracted to the later work of Philip Guston, which was too raw for my tastes, there is a connection to Shen’s brave willingness to use cartoonish painted characters to address loaded issues. During his time at school and in the military, Shen had more than enough of Socialist Realism in art, with its drab palette and vacuous iconography. During our three-way conversation, he and Duanmu Li taught me a great deal about the bright colors that he turned to, inspired not only by the art of children (for a time he taught studio art in an elementary school) to the vivid reds, blues and golds of Chinese folk art and the brightly colored thangka painting tradition in which specific colors bear religious significance. That is a terrific insight for understanding the vibrant greens, yellows, blues and reds of the group portrait Comedy Life, a veritable chorus of Chinese archetypes that slyly alludes as well to Western sources. Is that Vincent Van Gogh popping into view at the top left corner with a bandage over his ear? There is another great example of an artist who knew how to turn color into an expressive instrument.

When Shen invokes Antoine de St. Exupery, whose innocent style of drawings made The Little Prince a global bestseller, he drills into a deep well of the innocence of fairy tales. That may be our cue to take the long view of Shen’s emerging role as a bridge between Chinese and Western culture, because this seemingly simple exploration of memory, of life in all its pain and its happiness, leads to a more universal, perhaps subconscious (in the Jungian sense) of what it is to be human.

How do we ‘Begin Again’?

Lydia Duanmu

Art Advisor and Curator

In 2019, I visited Shen Jingdong at his studio where we agreed upon a solo exhibition at the CROSSING ART GALLERY in New York. Two weeks later, Shen Jingdong had just mailed more than two dozen works, to only share the same fate as all of us – a pandemic quarantine. However, on September 21, 2023, the long-awaited exhibition will finally open.

Shen Jingdong was born in Nanjing, China in 1965 and graduated from the Printmaking Department of the Fine Arts Department of Nanjing University of the Arts. He worked as an art teacher and a stage artist in the frontline of the Nanjing Military Political Department Song and Dance Troupe.Shen’s artistic career took off in 2006 when the National Art Museum of China added his work Hero no.12 to its collection. The numerous galleries, institutions and private collections that have included his works deems Shen as a contemporary art front-runner, not only in Asia but worldwide.

Shen Jingdong's portraitures are characterized by their innocence, evident in the unadulterated expressions and vivid color. Although one might discern Western pop art influences in his work, in my perspective, he has never sought to embark on the fast track of fusing Chinese and Western artistic traditions. This pure color palette carries a substantial historical depth, rooted in various aspects of Chinese culture, such as traditional ceramic art and folk art and murals. Shen Jingdong is undeniably a genuinely local artist, untouched by the likes of Yves Klein's blues or Mark Rothko's reds. Shen’s vibrant red hues draw from the legacy of the Chinese revolution, while his greens stem from the military uniforms he once wore. Consequently, this pure chromatic spectrum exudes a remarkable infectiousness, evoking memories of a bygone era for an entire generation.

A notable moment in the history of Chinese contemporary art is The 85 New Wave Movement, a movement made up of a cadre of young artists who opposed tradition and academia. Shen Jingdong witnessed their push for a more liberated expression of human rights through art, which later influenced his experimental characters. He employed porcelain doll-like, cartoonish depictions of children to convey the complexities of the adult world. Within Shen's artistic sphere, these collective, obsessive, childlike, and often comical expressions and imagery embodied the erstwhile heroes of his creative landscape.

To comprehend the creative essence of Shen Jingdong's artworks is to trace back to his experience in stage background design with the Military Region Art Troupe. His works exhibit a strong influence of stage aesthetics in their composition and layout, instigating viewers to engage in thoughtful exploration of the work's narrative. The artistic approach placed Shen in a unique position in the 1990s Chinese art scene as it did with Tom Wesselmann, Roy Lichtenstein, and James Rosenquist in the Western art world, respectively. 

While his art may sting and awaken the empathy of a generation, it also invites us to engage. Shen ingeniously employs humor and cartoon characters to navigate through the conflicts and pains of our time. His works imbue collective resonance whereby viewers subconsciously recognize that they've been grouped by notes of pessimism and self-deprecation, while also remaining melodious, joyous, and self-deprecating. After four years, I along many others have the opportunity to witness Shen’s beautiful and careful orchestration of politics, trauma and nostalgia. From the crimson-faced soldier blossoms of the Cultural Revolution's Red Era to what felt like millennia of a quarantine, As Karl Marx aptly stated, 'All great world-historical events and figures appeartwice, the first time as tragedy and the second time as comedy.‘ Shen Jingdong's renditions of historical events encourage viewers to contemplate, often with tearful laughter, life’s drama and how we might embark on a “fresh start.”