Chen Yifei; Indpendent obit (painter & filmmaker)
Hyfler/Rosner
Painter and film-maker who became the Chinese Martha Stewart
16 April 2005
Chen Yifei, artist, film director and entrepreneur: born
Ningbo, China 1946; twice married (two sons); died Shanghai
10 April 2005.
When the history of post-Mao China is finally written, it
will include a single painting: Twin Bridge (Shuang qiao) -
Memory of My Country, presented by Armand Hammer to China's
Paramount Leader Deng Xiaoping in November 1983. On the face
of it a faintly slushy representation of a river scene in
Zhouzhuang, the picture was actually deeply subversive. It
harked back to a time in Chinese art - to a China - that
predated the Socialist Realism ordained by Deng as the
official state school of painting. Worse, Twin Bridge was
the work of that same school's one-time star, recently
emigrated to America: Chen Yifei.
Until his departure for New York in 1980, Chen had been the
poster-boy of Chinese painting. Graduating from the
government art academy in Shanghai in 1965, he was admitted
to the Shanghai Institute of Painters at the unheard- of age
of 19. Honoured with the title of Revolutionary Socialist
Artist, Chen spent the following 10 years turning out
portraits of Chairman Mao. When, rarely, he was allowed to
vary his subject from the Great Helmsman, he was set to
painting scenes from revolutionary history: epic canvases
with titles like The Seizing of the Presidential Palace
(1971), hung in great halls around China.
Although now largely forgotten, these works established Chen
as the leading Chinese painter of his day. This,
predictably, led to his being denounced for recidivist
tendencies and banished for a period to work in the rice
fields. Officially purged, Chen took over the painting
department at his old art school in 1972, a position he
still held when the Cultural Revolution began to subside in
the late 1970s.
The relative freedoms of this period marked a change in
Chen's painting. His picture Looking at History from My
Space (1979) tested the post-Maoist waters by suggesting
that art might be a personal, rather than communal, thing.
Looking at History also did it what said, concentrating on
bourgeois scenes from China's pre-revolutionary past. It is
a measure of Chen's personal stature that he not only
survived this experiment, but was given leave to study at
New York's Hunter College the following year.
It is hard, in artistic terms, to imagine two cities more
different than the Shanghai of Deng Xiaoping and the New
York of Andy Warhol. Befuddled by this change, Chen turned
his back on Manhattan's contemporary art scene. Instead, he
found solace in old-fashioned American Realism: in grafting
the cinematic loneliness of Edward Hopper and go-west
confidence of the Hudson River School on to his own Chinese
tractor- factory style. The resulting hybrid - Chen dubbed
it "Romantic Realism" - was ridiculed by his fellow artists
and critics alike.
Its apparently anti-Communist blend of American-ness and
stylistic reaction struck a nerve with the elderly Armand
Hammer, however. Reasoning that a country that had elected
Ronald Reagan President might be ready for a return to
Realism, the chairman of Occidental Petroleum gave Chen a
one-man show at his Hammer Gallery in October 1983. One of
the pictures, Two Bridges, Hammer bought for himself: it was
given to Deng on a visit to Beijing the following month. The
rest went to collectors who, like Hammer, were rich and
right-wing.
A decade on, they were still buying. In 1992, Chen's
Lingering Melodies at Xunyang sold at auction at Sotheby's
for $175,000. Five years later, Poppy went for $500,000 -
still the highest price paid for the work of a living
Chinese artist. In London, Chen was represented by the
commercially minded Marlborough Gallery, who held moderately
successful shows of his work in 1997 and 2001.
For all this, Chen's legacy is unlikely to be artistic. His
overwrought style of painting was interesting more for its
place in history than for its place in art history. It was
the lessons in capitalism Chen learned during his 20 years
in America that bore real fruit. Realising that his artistic
reputation could be leveraged into something bigger, he went
back to China and reinvented himself as a one-man aesthetic
brand. His duty, Chen said, was "to provide beauty for the
people", and he set about doing so with vim.
In 1999, he launched a clothing label called Layefe,
described by one fashion writer as
"Banana-Republic-meets-People's-Republic". It now has 167
stores across China. This was followed in 2000 by a home
furnishings line with its flagship store in Shanghai's
super-hip Xintiandi district, and then by what is very
probably the world's largest fashion magazine: the 400-page,
two-kilo Vision, sponsored, curiously, by the Communist
Youth League. Recently, Chen and his son, Chen Ling, opened
a modelling agency, scoring a coup by signing up 2002's Miss
China. Altogether, the various arms of the Yifei empire
turned over $25m in 2003. "When I came home, there were one
billion people in China living without any real sense of
life style," said Chen. That this has changed is due largely
to him.
It will be sad if Chen is remembered merely as a Chinese
Martha Stewart, however. If his paintings were dubious, the
films he made later in life were not. One, Evening Liaison,
was placed in the "Certain Regard" class at Cannes in 1995.
Chen was working on his fourth film, The Barber, at the time
of his death. It will be completed by the eminent director
Ng See-Yuen.
Charles Darwent