Chen Yifei the Painter

 Chen Yifei the Film Director

Author: Jessie

The day -- April 10, 2005-- witnessed the passing away of one of China's most acclaimed and commercially successful painters and visual artists - Chen Yifei, who died of a stomach hemorrhage he suffered while working on a feature film, "The Barber." He was 59.

Known for his oil paintings, which were a blend of romanticism and realism, Chen was very active in the painting circles both at home and abroad. Many of his oil paintings fetched high prices at Christie's, Sotheby's, and other auctions in New York, which showed the international recognition for the strong Oriental taste in his works. He was one of the first Chinese artists to bridge the gap between the art of China's Cultural Revolution (1966-1976) and Western contemporary art.

Chen Yifei was born in 1946 in Ningbo, a coastal city of East China's Zhejiang Province. When he was a child, his family moved to Shanghai (also in East China), where he would later study Russian artists and Socialist Realism, China's official art style at the time. In 1965 he graduated from the Shanghai College of Art.

A year later, when the Cultural Revolution was just under way, Chen caught the attention of Communist Party officials with his propaganda work, which included portraits of Mao and heroic soldiers. Accordingly, he was a favorite of Communist Party leaders in the 1970's and 80's. He also was a favorite of Western industrialists, like Armand Hammer, the oil magnate, who purchased several of his works and presented one of them to Deng Xiaoping, the Chinese leader, as a gift.

Later, after the Cultural Revolution ended in 1976, Chen turned to more European-style romantic portraits of Chinese women in traditional dress and to colorful landscapes and Tibetan villagers.

In 1979, for the 30th anniversary of Communist rule in China, he painted Looking at History From My Space, a self-portrait of the artist glancing back at a canvas depicting a torrent of historical events from the early part of the 20th century, which brought him even greater national fame. The painting is still considered one of his most original works.

From 1980 to 1990, Chen lived in New York, and amassed a fortune by selling his work there, as well as in Hong Kong and London. In 1990, he returned to Shanghai, setting out to construct his own visual arts and fashion empire, vowing to bring art, beauty, and style to people who grew up in the early part of Communist China.

In 1980, Chen became one of the first artists from the People's Republic of China (founded in 1949) who were permitted to work and study art in the United States. Chen, with just US$38 in his pocket when he arrived in the US, soon enrolled at Hunter College and found work as an art restorer. In 1983, even before he received his master's degree at Hunter, his solo exhibition at the Hammer Galleries created a sensation by selling out in the first week. Later, he painted on contract for the Hammer Galleries.

Chen donated much of the money earned from the sale of his paintings to Project Hope, a charity foundation in China that benefits the underprivileged; he also set up an arts foundation.

In 1990, Chen returned to China, settling in Shanghai, where some critics say he became increasingly commercial. Although he often traveled to Tibet in Southwest China and painted Impressionist landscapes in his native Zhejiang Province, later in his life he transformed himself into a style entrepreneur, decorating hotels, creating fashion brands, and selling high-end clothing and chic home furnishings. He even oversaw one of the country's biggest modeling agencies.

Chen made his first film, Reveries on Old Shanghai, thus beginning his career as a film director. His films also included a documentary called Escape to Shanghai, about Jewish refugees in Shanghai before 1949; Evening Liaison, on the love story between a human being and a ghost,and the unfinished feature film, The Barber.

Reflecting on his return to China, he once told Time magazine, "I mean, there were one billion people living without any real sense of lifestyle, and my dream was to bring aesthetics to Chinese society."