Jiawei Shen Eyewitness (portrait of George Gittoes AM)

George Gittoes AM is one of Australia’s best-known figurative artists. Returning to Australia in 1970, after studying in the US, he was one of the founding artists of the famous Yellow House in Sydney. In the last decade his work has taken him all over the world from Nicaragua to Northern Ireland. Much of that time has been spent with UN peacekeeping forces in war-torn areas such as Somalia, Cambodia, Mozambique, the Middle East and Bosnia.

Jiawei Shen noticed Gittoes’ work shortly after arriving in Australia in 1989 and was fascinated by ‘his strong expressionist means and social realist manner. I feel we are both history painters, a rare animal becoming extinct in the contemporary art field,’ says Shen.

They met in 1996 and became friends. ‘I found that his style is not accidental but formed from his whole life, from his heart,’ says Shen. ‘The difference between him and most war artists is that George is a pacifist and always focuses on the destiny of war sufferers and refugees.’

Shen decided to paint Gittoes’ portrait after seeing a slide he had taken in Rwanda of a wooden statue of a black woman lying abandoned on a battlefield, which Shen saw as a metaphor for war and the victims of war. Gittoes did not want to be painted in an army uniform, instead he is pictured on the killing fields wearing colourful studio clothes. ‘That is the first dislocation in the painting,’ says Shen. ‘The second dislocation is on the statue’s figure: I have tried to suggest that the civilisation was destroyed by the war.’

Born in China in 1948, Shen was widely recognised in his homeland as a history painter. He was five times awarded National Art Exhibition Prizes and his works are in the collections of both the China Art Gallery and the Museum of the Chinese Revolution in Beijing. Since arriving in Sydney in 1989 Shen has worked as a full-time painter. He has won many art awards including the Mary MacKillop Art Award in 1995. He has been a finalist in the Archibald Prize every year since 1993.