Chen Yifei: The Romantic Realist

Born in Ningbo in 1946, just seven months after the close of World War II, Chen Yifei was the eldest of three children. The family relocated to Shanghai whilst Chen was still an infant. His father was a chemical engineer and his mother a former nun, whose devout Catholicism would influence her young son. Growing up, regular attendance at church opened the door to an interest in religious art and ritual, and shaped Chen’s initial contact with Western culture.

Chen’s precocious artistic talent was spotted at school, and he was awarded special opportunities in the Young Pioneers Movement. He immersed himself in the narrative realism of popular illustrated books, spending his free time drawing or studying in secondhand bookshops. Against his father’s wishes, Chen entered Shanghai’s High School of Art, gaining what would today be considered an unusually cosmopolitan art education. Chen was tutored by teachers well versed in European theory and practice, and at times visited exhibitions of Russian art (the Cossack realist history painter Vasily Surikov and the Romanian portraitist Corneliu Baba would become particular favourites). He also developed an appreciation of Tang dynasty poetry and Song dynasty ballads, naming many of his later paintings after these works. After breaking his leg in 1964, Chen spent two months convalescing in the company of Russian and Polish films, whose cinematic influences would become evident in his later paintings.

A period of acute turmoil in China’s history followed. Although from an intellectual family, Chen’s technical brilliance saw him frequently sent to Beijing to undertake major public works including large-scale portraits of China’s leader, Mao Zedong. In keeping with Socialist Realist ideology that art must serve political ends, these grand, idealised oil paintings of radiant heroes and heroines narrated tales of patriotic pride and verve. It was a period of enormous psychological and physical strain.

As the leading artist at the Shanghai Institute of Painting, Chen travelled widely throughout the Yellow River region looking for suitable subjects to paint. Detractors simultaneously denounced Chen’s “decadent” use of non-naturalistic colour and his hyperrealistic scenes of wartime strife. But he also gained widespread support, participating in China’s first national art exhibition under the Cultural Revolution in 1972. Many of Chen’s major historical paintings date to this period: Coming from the South and Leaving the North (1973), Writing in the Long Night - Lu Xun (1974), Wedding on the Execution Ground (1976, now in the collection of the China National Museum of Fine Arts in Beijing), as well as Seizing of the Presidential Palace (1977, now in the collection of the Chinese Revolutionary and Military Museum in Beijing).

The death of Mao and the end of the Cultural Revolution in the second half of the 1970s saw the gradual reopening of the country to Western influence. Chen admired the powerful imagery of the Abstract Expressionist painter Willem de Kooning, whose work was featured in the Western art journals circulating in China. In 1978 Shanghai hosted a major travelling show of the French Barbizon School painters including Jean-François Millet, whose rustic scenes of peasant farmers and landscapes of village life perturbed academic painting.

Simultaneously, Chen’s reputation was being forged abroad: in 1979 his work was included in a major exhibition of Chinese art that travelled to Japan, Hong Kong, Germany and France, whilst New York’s The Art News (now known as ARTnews) covered his radical painterly reflection on recent Chinese history, Thinking of History from my Space (1979), going on to praise Chen for his “incisive focus, realism with a psychological depth, a crisp yet painterly style.”

Restless and wanting “to see for myself all the art I knew only from reproductions,” 1980 was a year of momentous change for Chen. He scraped together enough funds for a plane ticket to New York. There, Chen revelled in the plethora of art at his doorstep, particularly Pablo Picasso’s retrospective at the Museum of Modern Art. He was awarded a scholarship to study at Hunter College, becoming “the first artist from the People's Republic of China to study in the United States” according to The Art Newspaper. Chen also spent a year working as a restorer on works by John Singer Sargent, Picasso and Robert Motherwell, an experience that fuelled his already obsessive focus on technique. He befriended other Chinese expatriates in Manhattan, including the film director Zhang Yimou and the composer Tan Dun. Hungry for more, Chen spent the summer of 1982 travelling throughout Europe, sleeping on trains or on benches as he journeyed between cities.

Chen’s first Western solo show, in 1983 at Hammer Galleries in New York, was a critical and commercial success. Far away from home, he gravitated towards recreating the China of his childhood: the water towns of Jiangnan with their stone bridges and elegant tile-roofed houses.

Chen’s work rapidly became the official symbol of East-West kinship. His painting of two bridges in Zhouzhuang, Hometown Memories - Double Bridge, was presented to the Chinese leader Deng Xiaoping in 1985 by Chen’s benefactor, the American industrialist Armand Hammer. That same year, another painting of Zhouzhuang, Bridge, became the inaugural United Nations first day cover postage stamp.

Four more solo shows followed in the 1980s at Hammer Galleries. “Chen Yifei’s studio is bare, but he’s hardly in despair. He sold nearly every painting he did last year,” enthused The New York Times in 1984. His style, dubbed “romantic realism” by The New York Times and Art News, saw him included in institutional surveys of Chinese art at the Brooklyn Museum (1983) Connecticut’s New England Center for Contemporary Art (1983), and his first solo show outside New York, at the Corcoran Gallery of Art in Washington D.C. in 1985.

Chen’s style was rapidly absorbing the myriad influences of his international life. “I want to let my eyes look at not just one style but everything, even movies and plays. It’s very exciting. My style will change, not from picking out a new style, but slowly, from my heart and soul,” reflected Chen.

A cinematic aesthetic surfaced in his works. Chen’s Musicians series of the 1980s was a huge hit with contemporary audiences. Exploring the psychological inner world, Caravaggio-esque tenebrism spotlighted the graceful forms of women playing the flute and violin, combining classical painting tropes with the startling immediacy of photorealism.

From the 1990s Chen’s works began revisiting the golden era of 1930s Shanghai through visions of untouchable and unknowable orientalist femininity. Seductively clad in lustrous embroidered silk robes and ornate jewelled headpieces, Chen’s languid Noble Ladies gaze coolly into the middle distance, observe themselves coyly in the mirror, clutch the stem of a delicate fan between slim manicured fingers, strum the pipa, and watch their caged pet birds with melancholic, irony-laden fascination. Drawing on his vast knowledge of diverse artistic traditions, Chen’s masterpiece Banquet (1991), a cinematic tableau of five beautiful women playing the guan and dizi, echoes Gu Hongzhong's 10th century scroll painting of courtly intrigues, The Night Revels of Han Xizai (980 AD). The painting sold for HK$54.5 million at Sotheby’s Hong Kong in 2022.

Around this time Chen also began forging a path as a filmmaker. His canvases grew in scale to match his ambitions onscreen, immersing viewers in the floating world of Chen’s Shanghai. Chen’s first film, Old Dreams on the Sea (1992), premiered at the first Shanghai International Film Festival in 1993. It followed his painting series of the same name, framing wordless nostalgic reveries of his hometown’s women and architecture onscreen. Chen’s second film, Evening Liaison (1995), a noirish romantic mystery set in 1930s Shanghai, was selected for the prestigious Un Certain Regard section at the 1995 Cannes Film Festival.

In 1988 Chen visited Tibet for the first time. The earthy spirituality of Tibetan life and the “purity” of its land beguiled Chen, and from 1990 he spent more time working in China and Asia. Chen’s painting style found new energy in his Tibetan subjects, graduating from the smooth, layered strokes of his Shanghainese beauties towards a heavy, impressionistic impasto which he repeatedly sandpapered. “The feeling of the people there is very strong and powerful, the colour of their skin and their clothing is so distinct. I try to match that power in my paintings: in composition, form and the application of paint,” he remarked. With weathered skin and eyes furrowed against the unrelenting sun over the Tibetan plateau, Chen observed the daily comings and goings of Tibet’s inhabitants, spending several weeks each year living amongst them. He captured the solidarity of their communities at morning prayers (Morning Prayer, 1996), the anxious eyes of a mother visible over a scarf wrapped around her face to block the biting winds (Mother in Red, 1999), the quizzical looks of two children outside a temple encountering a stranger in their midst (Child and Temple, 1999).

The Tibetan series made its debut at Chen’s 1996 Shanghai retrospective, and eight monumental paintings of Tibet were exhibited in Chen’s solo presentation at the first ever Chinese pavilion at the 1997 Venice Biennale. The Wenhui Book Review noted, “Critics believe that his style has once again turned to the bold and majestic. Chen, however, holds that he still embodies the concepts he has always adhered to: strength, sculptural texture, and the sense of modernity”.

For Chen, self-declared “practitioner of visual arts”, life and beauty were inseparable. Infatuated by the notiong of Gesamtkunstwerk, he proposed the idea of “Greater Art” in China. His brother Chen Yiming explained:

In his later years, Chen strove to fulfil his mission of disseminating beauty across all aspects of modern Chinese life. He established his own clothing brand, Layefe (a play on his own name) in the 1990s, followed by the launch of Vision magazine, a publication exploring contemporary Chinese aesthetics in art, fashion and technology. In 2000, he began a designer homeware line, Layefe Home. As a special consultant on urban planning and design, Chen left his mark on projects in his beloved city ranging from Shanghai’s Taikang Road art district to early-stage planning for the 2010 Shanghai World Expo. Light of the East — Sundial (2000), a stainless steel sculpture co-designed by Chen and French architect Jean-Marie Charpentier, still stands at the intersection of Pudong’s Century Avenue and Yanggao Road. In 2005, while producing his fourth film, Chen suffered a gastric haemorrhage and passed away unexpectedly at the age of 58.

His life and oeuvre, though tragically cut short, had traversed the dizzying span of 20th century Chinese history, from Socialist Realism to romantic realism, from cultural documentation to cinematic expression, forging new links between Chinese culture and the Western world. Chen Yifei’s legacy endures to this day, a testament to the limitless possibilities of authentic artistic expression that transcends cultural boundaries whilst remaining deeply rooted in one's origins.