03/05/2026
Not every artist lives inside a gallery.
Some drive tourists through rainforest roads in Cairns.
Some spend decades carrying culture quietly, without ever needing to announce it.
Mike Sha is one of them.
Born in Shanghai in 1963, graduating from China Academy of Art in 1986, and moving to Australia in 1988, Mike has spent nearly four decades living between two worlds.
By profession, he works in tourism.
By nature, he never stopped being an artist.
Sometimes he jokes that he gets more excited than the tourists when visiting a destination — because every landscape is not only scenery, but possibility.
A coastline becomes composition.
A rainforest becomes texture.
A tree frog on a kitchen window becomes an artwork collected by international exhibition hosts.
That is how artists see the world.
Living in Far North Queensland, surrounded by reef, rainforest, and the quiet details of tropical life, Mike’s work does not simply document Cairns — it interprets it.
He does not just see Cairns as a destination, but as a living cultural landscape.
Through colour, abstraction, and observation, his art turns place into emotion and everyday life into visual language.
Mike’s abstract paintings and photography have been exhibited across Sydney, Canberra Parliament House, Hong Kong Central Library, Ningbo, and Budapest Art Museum.
He was invited as a featured artist for the 4th International Digital Art Triennial in Hungary, and is also invited as a curator for the 2026 Venice Biennale Parallel Exhibition — one of the world’s most significant platforms for contemporary art.
But perhaps the most beautiful thing about his work is not where it is shown.
It is how he explains it.
“Abstract on the outside, reality within.
It is like a kite that never loses its string.”
His art may look highly abstract, but it never loses connection to reality, nature, memory, and cultural identity.
That sentence feels bigger than art.
It feels like migration.
It feels like all of us who live overseas.
We move across countries, languages, and identities — but the string remains.
As a Committee Member of Silk Road Voices
and Vice President of the Australia Alumni Association of China Academy of Art, Mike brings more than artistic achievement.
He brings perspective.
He reminds us that cultural exchange is not always loud.
Sometimes it begins with a painting.
Sometimes with a conversation.
Sometimes simply with the quiet decision to never let the string break.
And that is exactly why his work belongs in conversations about Cairns, culture, and community.
His work speaks quietly —
between abstraction and reality,
between Australia and China,
between what we see and what we feel.
A few glimpses into the world Mike continues to create — quietly, consistently, and without ever losing the string.
