Artwork Description

Title: Triumphal
Artist: Shen Shubin (申树斌)
Date: 2018
Medium: Oil on canvas
Dimensions: 86 ⅝ × 118 ⅛ in (220 × 300 cm)

1. Artwork Identification
A monumental canvas over three meters wide, Triumphal depicts an ethereal arch rising from an icy, indeterminate seascape. At close range the structure resolves into dozens of loosely impastoed vignettes—cavalry charges, imperial audiences, and battlefield farewells—quoting canonical European history paintings of the Napoleonic era. Shen Shubin’s characteristic palette-knife strokes leave passages of raw linen exposed, allowing light to flicker between figuration and abstraction.

2. Artistic Style and Influences
Shen is celebrated for a Chinese strain of magic realism that fuses academic draftsmanship with gestural surfaces. Here he appropriates Western triumphal-arch iconography—Piranesi’s fantasies, Gérôme’s pageantry, Delaroche’s melodrama—then dissolves it in sweeping oil skeins reminiscent of Zao Wou-Ki or Cecily Brown. The result is both history painting and its deconstruction, inviting comparison to Neo-Baroque painters such as Neo Rauch while retaining the lyrical materiality of post-1980s Chinese oil practice.

3. Historical Context
Painted in 2018, the work reflects a moment when Chinese artists were reassessing global narratives of power amid shifting geopolitics. By reconstructing Napoleon’s mythos, Shen interrogates the universal impulse to monumentalize victory—whether in 19th-century Europe or in today’s competing national stories. The frozen sea beneath the arch hints at environmental fragility, a recurrent theme in Shen’s oeuvre that dovetails with worldwide anxieties about climate and empire.

4. Provenance
Provenance documentation can be provided upon contact.

5. Condition and Conservation
Very good overall condition. The paint surface shows intentional heavy impasto and controlled drips with no evidence of flaking. Canvas is taut on its original stretcher.

6. Artistic Significance
Triumphal stands among Shen Shubin’s most ambitious large-scale statements, encapsulating his pivot from allegorical animal tableaux to grand civilizational critique. By collapsing heroic episodes into a single, ice-bound monument, the artist invites collectors to reconsider both the permanence of glory and the precariousness of cultural memory. Works of this size and thematic scope by Shen have been highlights of institutional shows from Berlin to Beijing, underscoring their resonance with curators and scholars of global contemporary art.