History on canvas

[Photo provided to China Daily]

The centerpiece of the current exhibition is Long March 1936, an album of some 600 drawings on leaves telling how Red Army units separately triumphed in several battles before merging in Gansu.

It took Shen two years to complete the album and is a sequel to The Earth's Red Flying Ribbon, an album he drew from 1988 to 1993, visualizing a namesake novel on the march by the late Chinese writer Wei Wei.

Shen executed the pieces combining approaches in oil painting and engraving with the lining technique of traditional Chinese painting.

"Cultural products that are completed quickly are now in big demand. But I'm a painter who needs a lot of time to focus on one thing," he says.

"At my age, I want to do what I like to do, and I'm not tired."

Another signature piece from Shen's Long March series on show is Zunyi Conference. In it, he shows a CPC meeting in Southwest China's Guizhou province in 1935.

He applied a gray tone to indicate both the cold weather at the conference location and how it mattered to the fate of the Red Army, which was then at a critical moment in the Long March.