Jun Yuan

I am writing for my dad, Junyuan Shen. He is the arduous painter who has created all the work in this collection.
Junyuan Shen was born in 1950. He has the passion of painting when he was a child. During the cultural revolution, there is no academic education available for a young artist. Even though he practiced from painting the portrait of Chairman Mao to the murals on the buildings. In my early memory of my dad, he travels and paints on the concrete walls along the railway from the cities to the rural area. He has a full-time job as an art teacher in Changzhou culture committee. But he has been drawing and painting every day in his life. His painting depicted the fast-disappearing old cities in China, the changes in our everyday life, the places we have traveled, and new members to our family.
My dad has been to the US twice. Once I was in Boston and studied at Harvard for landscape architecture degree. The other time when I just moved to LA when I got my job. When he was living with me in the US, he doesn’t have a studio to work on oil paintings, so he kept painting with watercolor to record everyday sightseeing.

Academy of Fine Arts in Changzhou, China