film stills © Shen Xin

Counting Blessings

digital video, 37:30, 2014

Counting Blessings documents the artist’s father, Shen Daohong, who is also an artist, in his search for authentic images of Tibetan people and culture for his own practice. Deeply influenced by the Russian realist painters like Ilya Repin, the father sets the goal of his career to achieving realism through innovative Chinese ink practice, and depicting Tibetan is one of his main subject matters. In the film Shen conducted interviews around the photo archive the father keeps, and set out performative tasks for the father and his friends. The film also reveals Shen’s reality in maintaining a paralleled practice in order to be financially self-sufficient and to be exposed to western art education.

Camera: Wang Xingang, Shen Xin

Director, Sound and Video Editor: Shen Xin

With special thanks to my father Shen Daohong, and his friends Wang Xingang and Xin Shi