Art on Art: On James Bradley's Welcome to Babel

One of the titles in the main competition of the Beyond Borders Kastellorizo International Documentary Festival 2025 was the Australian film Welcome to Babel by director James Bradley.

It tells the story of the Chinese artist Jiawei Shen’s work with a special painting: Tower of Babel. In doing so, the film takes us back to the artist’s youth. It follows Shen and the woman he married, Lan Wang. We learn bits and pieces of their history through many decades.

It is a very good documentary. But it also caught my interest for another reason. The film is about art, and more precisely, about two artists. I take an interest in films about art, whether documentaries or fiction. Such films give us opportunities to dive into one piece of art, an artist’s range of work—or the artist himself/herself. I suggest that a good film on art—or an artist—may help us to study the art more closely, and widen our understanding of it. Among the topics I like the most in films on art is the story behind the piece of art that the film presents, or the way the artist thinks, feels, and works.

A good film on art is art on art.

In Shen’s case, his life story is of special interest. And Bradley generously gives us enough of that story, up to the present, for us to understand the background of the aforementioned painting.

Jiawei Shen and Lan Wang grew up in a special phase of China’s communist era, when Mao Zedong started the cultural revolution in the late sixties, which continued through the early seventies. Both were sent to rural areas in North China for physical work and political education.

Shen gained fame when he painted Standing Guard for the Great Motherland (1974). The painting was regarded as patriotic and was reproduced and widely distributed in China.

To make a long story short: The couple now lives in Sydney, Australia. Here Shen has worked on his large painting based on several events in world history of the last 120 years.

But his wife Lan Wang is an artist in her own right. The film shows some of her art as well. And for me, her art is also very interesting. I regret that the film does not use more time to talk about her and her art.

But, let us go back to Shen´s polyptych painting Tower of Babel, which he has been working on for more than seven years. It is an impressive work of art. He tells the story of international communism since the start of the twentieth century. The painting consists of four panels, which are more than seven meters high. Altogether we can let our eyes wander over 130 square meters of history.

The painting depicts more than 400 portraits of people that in one way or the other are connected to the history of communism. Many of them famous, others anonymous. We find Lenin in two versions, one at his height, the other as a sick man just before he died. Mao is painted in a different way from what has been accepted in China. Several artists are included as well, such as Picasso and Frida Kahlo. Philosophers, such as Hanna Arendt, are also present.

The Tower of Babel is, of course, present in the painting called Tower of Babel.

Bradley and cinematographer Peter Coleman invite us, via camera, to a voyage of discovery across the different parts of the painting. We are witnesses both to the work in progress, and the finished painting.

Sometimes, documentary filmmakers take on a task that could not be done just as well and just as richly by anyone else. James Bradley is, with Tower of Babel, a good example.

A documentary film is the perfect medium to tell this story. We get to know the two painters, the country they were born and grew up in, that country’s special conditions in a certain period, the conditions of art in that country and the country they moved to, bits and pieces of their life story—and the comprehensive story that one of them tells us in what seems to be one of his most important pieces of art, painted late in his life.

Jan Storø
Edited by Robert Horton
© FIPRESCI 2025