Chen Yifei

Hammer Galleries, New York
Acquired by the present owner from the above

Chen Yifei was born in 1949 in Zhenhai city in Zhejiang Province.  He was the most versatile and distinguished artist among his generation.  His family moved to Shanghai after four months of his birth.  He studied under the painter Yu Yunjie, and remained in Shanghai until 1981 where he chaired the oil painting department at the Shanghai Art Academy.  In China, he achieved fame through his paintings Taking over the Presidential Palace (1977, collaboration with Wei Jingshan, collection of Military Museum, Beijing) and Looking at History from My Place (1979).  Those two paintings were noted for their attempt at photographic realism, a technique hitherto untested by academic oil painters.  In 1978, Chen attended a major exhibition of Barbizon paintings from Paris at the Shanghai Exhibition Center. He was deeply influenced by Millet's works and decided later that year to seek an opportunity to go abroad. In 1981, he moved to the U.S.

Chen was a romantic Shanghai gentleman and an adventurous hero.  Like his Shanghai peers Chen Danqing, Xia Baoyuan and Han Xin, he was fascinated by 19^th century romanticism and classicism, and deeply admired the Impressionists. Living far away from home, Chen found his own uniquely Shanghai-inspired way to express his nostalgia through a series of Zhouzhuang and Suahou landscape paintings. Summer Haze (Suzhou) was shown in the exhibition Chen Yifei: Recent Paintings at the Hammer Galleries in New York in 1986.  In this work, the artist created a dreamy and harmonious village abutting a canal, of the type commonly found in Suzhou. Chen used Impressionist sources as his technical and compositional models.  The village lived in the artist's mind and imagination; the painting, with its pastel water surfaces and cinematic angles, was composed from memory.  “Like the literati landscape painters, Chen sees his world in quiet, relaxing tones.  This subdued vision of the landscape originates in ancient China with the birth of ink painting on silk…they were ‘poems without words.” (Richard Lynch, “Chen Yifei: Recent Paintings,” Hammer Galleries, 1986, p.2).

Chen Yifei died in Shanghai on April 10, 2005 at the age of 59.