Tai-Shan Schierenberg

During the season Schierenberg gained "unprecedented access" to West Bromwich Albion Football Club for the production of a Channel 4 documentary called ‘The Football Club’, which is part of the channel’s ‘Artist in Residence’ series. Schierenberg sought "to understand what it was about the game that makes it so compelling", and whilst he began the project as a football cynic, he emerged as a fan of the club.

In 1989 he won joint first prize in the National Portrait Gallery's John Player Portrait Award, and as part of the prize, was commissioned to paint the portrait of playwright John Mortimer for the Gallery's collection. The National Portrait Gallery also holds his portraits of Lord Carrington from 1994, Lord Sainsbury 2002 and most recently Seamus Heaney from 2004. He has also executed the commission for a double portrait of the Royal Couple. His paintings can be seen at Flowers East in Hackney.

Schierenberg eventually returned to London, where he has remained ever since. He applied to and was accepted by St. Martin's and in due course, Slade School of Art for postgraduate studies, which he finished in 1987.

Tai-Shan Schierenberg (born 1962) is a British portrait painter, based in London. He was the joint winner of the 1989 BP Portrait Award and is Head of Painting at The Art Academy in London.

Tai-Shan Schierenberg was born in England in 1962, the eldest of three sons to a very young Chinese mother and a German painter. As a child, he spent the first years of his life with his grandparents in Malaysia but was eventually returned to his London-based parents for the beginning of primary school..