Chen Yifei, a well-known Chinese painter, fashion designer and film director, died at age 59 on Sunday morning in Shanghai.
He is remembered nationwide as not only an active artist-entrepreneur but also as a special witness to the friendly relationship between China and the United States.
Chen was admitted by the Huashan Hospital in Shanghai on April 6 for stomach pains and died four days later from upper-digestive-tract hemorrhage. Doctors with the hospital said exhaustion led to his illness. Prior to the hospitalization, Chen was filming a new movie named the Barber in Fuyang, a city of the neighboring Zhejiang Province.
Shooting of the film was almost completed. The movie's crew said they will work even harder to complete the last production of the artist who just passed away.
Born in 1946 in Zhenhai of Zhejiang, Chen Yifei graduated from the Shanghai Fine Art School in 1965. He went to the United States to attend university in 1980, leaving behind the security of his position as head of the Oil Painting Department at the Shanghai Painting Academy. He got a masters degree in art in 1984 when he rose to stardom.
During his years in the United States, Chen painted elegant American and Chinese musicians as well as the countryside scenery of south Yangtze River. In October 1983, his first one-man exhibition was held at New York's Hammer Galleries. The art show created a sensation and sent what some US art critics said a clear message to the New York art arena: classical realism was back against the blatant modernism.
In November that year, Armand Hammer, the owner of the Hammer Galleries and then the chairman of the Occidental Petroleum Corp. bought one piece of Chen's work -- Twin Bridge (Shuangqiao)-- Memory of My Country, and presented it to China's late paramount leader Deng Xiaoping, when they met in Beijing. Thus Chen became a special witness of friendship between China and the United States through his artistic production. The story was much told in both artistic and diplomatic circles.
Art critics said Chen Yifei's work does not fit easily into a "Chinese" or "Western" mold. His art can be described as "multi-cultural" in the sense of combining the best of several cultures, in particular the western oil paintings and traditional Chinese paintings, according to the critics.
Chen painted realistic portraits and impressionistic scenery. His portraits included Western musicians, Chinese musicians playing traditional instruments such as the pipa, minstrels in medieval garb, Tibetan villagers and ballet dancers. His landscapes extend from Venice to the canals of his native Zhejiang Province. The critics said whatever the theme and style, the common aesthetic link behind all of Chen Yifei's work is a commitment to beauty.
"I have eyes of a painter, and I always cherish the curiosity of a child for any beauty in life," Chen Yifei said.
In 1991, Chen's work -- Lingering Melodies at Xunyang or Farewell at Xunyang, was auctioned in Hong Kong at 1.37 million HK dollars (US$162,000), at the time the highest price ever received for a contemporary Chinese painting. The auction gained him an artistic-entrepreneur status. He has since witnessed many of his work sell record high prices at Christie's, Sotheby's and other auctions in New York and Hong Kong.
Chen began to film in 1993. In 1995, his movie -- A Date at Dusk -- was entered at the Festival De Cannes.
In 1999 Chen produced two artistic documentaries named Escape to Shanghai and Ark of Shanghai to depict experience of the Jews who came to Shanghai from Europe during the World War II.
Chen Yifei's turn to the fashion industry aroused some disputes in China's artistic circle. Traditionally, Chinese people see a painter as aloof from petty politics and material pursuits and faraway from commerce and business. But Chen said, "I'd like to make my own choice for way of life. I love paintings, clothing and films. In my point of view, they are all beautiful."
In 1999 Chen started a fashion business named Layefe. One year later, he established two homeware outlets in Shanghai. All the while, he acted as the agent of several successful art designer for China's premier fashion magazine -- Yifei Vision -- sponsored by China Youth Magazine under the Central Committee of the Communist Youth League of China.
Chen gave much of the money earned from the sale of his paintings to Project Hope, a charity that benefits the underprivileged, and established an arts foundation, according a Beijing-based newspaper.
(Xinhua News Agency April 12, 2005)
