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Joanna Mendelssohn, Honorary Senior Fellow, School of Culture and Communication. Editor in chief, Design and Art of Australia Online, The University of Melbourne

Welcome to Babel: new documentary charts the creation of painter Jiawei Shen’s three-storey magnum opus

Greg Weight/Bonsai Films

When Jiawei Shen first came to Australia, he bought a copy of that great western ideological text, the Bible. The doctrine that had shaped his life until then had come from the writings of the great Marxist thinkers – Karl Marx, Vladimir Lenin and of course, Mao Zedong.

It made sense, therefore, to study the source of the ideology that supposedly shaped this strange new world. Right near the beginning, in Genesis chapter 11, he found the intriguing story of the Tower of Babel, a myth on the origin of linguistic and cultural confusion.

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