 Chen Yi Fei is primarily known as Yifei Chen
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This biography from the Archives of AskART:
|  A well-known, commercially successful painter, decorator, film maker and designer, Chen Yifei spent most of his life in China but lived in New York City from 1980 to 1990. He did many oil paintings that blended styles of realism and romanticism and was one of the first artists to bridge the gap between art of the Cultural Revolution and contemporary art of the West.
He was born in Ningbo in Zhejiang Province. As a child, he moved with his family to Shanghai and there studied Russian art and Socialist Realism, which was the official art of China. He graduated from the Shanghai College of Art in 1965, the beginning of the Cultural Revolution. Early in his career, he followed the party line of Mao-Tse-Tung and did large-scale, "glorified" portraits of the leader. He became popular with communist party leaders in the 1970s and was recognized as one of the leading artists at the state sponsored Shanghai Institute of Painting. Bringing him special fame was his work titled Looking at History From My Space, which was a self portrait looking back on 20th-Century historical events in China.
In 1980, he was one of the first Chinese artists given government permission to study art in the United States. He attended Hunter College and earned money as an art restorer. By 1983, he had his first solo exhibition, which was at the Hammer Galleries, and his work was so well received that commissions flowed from that event. Armand Hammer, oil magnate, gave a painting by Yifei as a gift to Chinese leader Deng Xiaoping.
In 1990, when he returned to his own country, he vowed to bring aesthetic beauty into the lives of the many persons who had grown up in Communist China. Of that period, he said: "there were one billion people living without any sense of lifestyle." Some of his detractors say that Yifei's work became increasingly commercial because he focused on fashion design and interior decoration. However, he did many Impressionist landscapes of his native province as well. He also made film documentaries, and died on April 10, 2005 from a stomach hemorrhage while making the film Barber.
Source:
David Barboza, 'Chen Yifei, 59, Painter and Entrepreneur', The New York Times Obituary, April 14, 2005 |
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